James E. Randall

Establishing and sustaining community–university partnerships: A case study of quality of life research

Community is a key construct in population health research and a major locus of health determinants study. In recent years in Canada, a new emphasis on such research has emerged in the form of community–university partnerships, supported by several of the major research granting agencies. The authors regard such partnerships as a special case of participatory action research (PAR), albeit one where greater emphasis is placed on the institutional nature of the university research partner. Drawing from the first three years’ experience of a local quality of life study, and the extant North American literature on community–university partnerships, this article explores how such partnerships are established and sustained. These processes are illustrated with critical reflections on some of the methods, actions and relational issues that arose during the authors’ quality of life project. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the potential benefits and costs of the growing Canadian trend to require such partnerships as a condition for research grants.

The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement: Impacts on U.S. States and Canadian Provinces

The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement initiated in 1989 will remove most of the remaining barriers to trade and will have substantial impacts on regional economies in both nations. The economic effects of this Free Trade Agreement are analyzed using a three-stage approach. First, the origin states and provinces of exports from each nation to the other are approximated using weights derived from local output by industry as a share of national totals. Second, commodity-specific analyses of tariffs and nontariff barriers, as well as price and income elasticities of demand, are used to estimate changes in exports from regions in both nations. Third, a series of state- and province-specific input-output analyses are used to model the effects of export increases. The output and employment gains attributable to the Free Trade Agreement indicate that while the largest increases are likely to occur in the traditional manufacturing cores of both nations, relative export gains will be dispersed in a complex patchwork of regions in both nations.

A Gender-Sensitive Urban Factorial Ecology: Male, Female,Grouped, and Gendered Social Spaces in Saskatoon.

Significant social, demographic, and economic changes related to gender have occurred within North American cities in the past generation. It is hypothesized that these changes may have led to the emergence of distinct male and female social spaces that have not been fully accommodated within the classical urban factorial ecologies. This paper compares and analyzes four gender-specific data bases (male-oriented, female-oriented, grouped, and gendered) through a series of four factorial ecologies for census tracts in the city of Saskatoon, Canada. It is discovered that, at an aggregate level of analysis, both male and female social spaces are similar when assessed in terms of the composition of the components, the saturation levels, the correlations between components, and the spatial distribution of the component scores. However, separation of gender into different data sets leads us to the conclusion that subtle gender-specific differences, formerly masked by classical factorial ecologies, are clarified ...

A Model for Collaborative Research: Building a Community-University Institute for Social Research

This paper addresses the social relevance of research undertaken by academic geographers to find a model that integrates the community and the university into social research issues. The challenge we faced is that many involved in the practice of social and economic change within our communities have been disillusioned by a traditional scholarly model of research that appears to be disconnected from the service delivery and policy needs of the organizations and people they are ultimately intended to serve. This chapter provides one case study to address this problem by outlining the activities of a research partnership between the University of Saskatchewan and various government, community-based, and private-sector organizations in Saskatoon, Canada, entitled the Community-University Institute for Social Research (CUISR — see article at http://www.usask.ca/cuisr).