What researchers bring to communities, and what may or may not be left behind when their work is done

The United States is now experiencing a substantial expansion of community-based participatory research (CBPR).  Much of the new CPBR work builds on the multiple decades of accomplishments in the field of evaluation research.  Researchers from many different disciplines (medicine, psychiatry, public health, social science, genetics) are being asked for the first time to partner with community organizations in health disparity communities in the hope of developing more effective disparity-reduction strategies. 

Researchers who are new to community engaged research would benefit from briefly reflecting on how the research process itself (beyond any particular intervention being studied or planned) impacts the community over the short and long term.  Such a reflection serves as an orientation to and cautionary tale about the radical and political nature of the community research enterprise – an enterprise which often leaves both the researcher and the community changed in unexpected ways.

This paper will focus on a specific problem in community-based participatory research and in evaluation research: the decision to leave a community at the close of an evaluation project or CPBR project.  Neither CBPR nor the field of evaluation provides guidance for the researcher, but nonetheless it is commonplace for researchers to leave communities, typically, as funding for a specific project dries up.  A great deal of energy is spent on describing how to begin working with a community and how to work with a community, but little is spent on the process of leaving.  Studying the process of leaving a community, I believe, provides a window onto how theoretically thin the role of the research can be in these disciplines and how clinical sociology has resources that can expand, enrich and clarify that role.