American Sociological Association 104th Annual Meeting
San Francisco, CA
Special Session on CBPR

Date: Monday, August 10, 2009

Time: 8:30 – 10:10 a.m.

Location: Hilton San Francisco (Downtown: 333 O'Farrell Street)

Organizer/Sponsor: Dana M. Sampson, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)

Moderator: Lee Herring, American Sociological Association (ASA)

Title: Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR): When Academic/Research Institutions Meet the Real World

Purpose: To illustrate how CBPR is a unique approach used to effectively bring about actual, positive change in both policy and community health.

Description: Community-based participatory research is an orientation to public health research that requires a collaborative approach to involve participants throughout all stages of research projects. A more comprehensive approach than community-based or community-placed research, CBPR requires that all stakeholders in research projects—community members, representatives, and researchers alike—recognize one another’s expertise as strengths, thus ensuring mutual respect and contributions before, during, and after a single public health study. (Read more about CBPR here.)

The theme of ASA’s 2009 Annual Meeting is "The New Politics of Community" in recognition of the evolving concept of community. Considering that people increasingly interpret community in diverse ways, the association’s program committee encourages you to “consider the significance of these changing and contradictory understandings of community”. Further, the meeting aims to “catalyze the process of building more robust, excellent and diverse sociological communities”. Similarly, the session organizer’s goal is to highlight the new politics of community research.

The new politics of community research calls for increased participation from communities and their stakeholders. We have entered a new era shifting away from purely theoretical and exclusive public health research. The modern era disallows tokenism and requires authentic inclusion/collaboration if research is to be accurate, impactful, and sustainable. According to ASA President, Patricia Hill Collins, the new politics constitutes an object of study and a matter of practice for sociologists. The same arguably holds true for public health researchers.

Facilitated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this workshop offers current research community thought on CBPR approaches, discusses active NIH funding opportunity announcements (FOAs), and showcases thriving research projects from grantees. Presenters include NIH program officials overseeing CBPR programs, an accomplished expert\thought leader, and an innovative research-community (non-academic) collaboration formed to conduct health promotion and intervention research.

Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of CBPR, NIH’s commitment to the approach, how it resonates with NIH’s priorities, and successful CBPR-based research studies.

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