Nicole Thomas

Using community-based participatory research to develop the PARTNERS youth violence prevention program.

Background: School-based violence prevention programs have shown promise for reducing aggression and increasing childrens prosocial behaviors. Prevention interventions within the context of urban after-school programs provide a unique opportunity for academic researchers and community stakeholders to collaborate in the creation of meaningful and sustainable violence prevention initiatives.Objectives: This paper describes the development of a collaborative between academic researchers and community leaders to design a youth violence prevention/leadership promotion program (PARTNERS Program) for urban adolescents. Employing a community-based participatory research (CBPR) model, this project addresses the needs of urban youth, their families, and their community.Methods: Multiple strategies were used to engage community members in the development and implementation of the PARTNERS Program. These included focus groups, pilot testing the program in an after-school venue, and conducting organizational assessments of after-school sites as potential locations for the intervention.Results: Community members and academic researchers successfully worked together in all stages of the project development. Community feedback helped the PARTNERS team redesign the proposed implementation and evaluation of the PARTNERS Program such that the revised study design allows for all sites to obtain the intervention over time and increases the possibility of building community capacity and sustainability of programs.Conclusion: Despite several challenges inherent to CBPR, the current study provides a number of lessons learned for the continued development of relationships and trust among researchers and community members, with particular attention to balancing the demand for systematic implementation of community-based interventions while being responsive to the immediate needs of the community.

Building Community Participatory Research Coalitions from the Ground Up: The Philadelphia Area Research Community Coalition

Background: A coalition of formal, large organizations and informal, grassroots organizations, recruited through an open process, contrasts with the usual practice of developing a community-based participatory research (CBPR) coalition with a small number of well-developed organizations. Objectives: This paper describes the process, developmental challenges, and accomplishments of the Philadelphia Area Research Community Coalition (PARCC). Methods: The University of Pennsylvania–Cheyney University of Pennsylvania EXPORT Center established the PARCC, an academic–community research partnership of twenty-two diverse organizations of variable size and with variable experience in health research. The EXPORT Center provided the infrastructure and staff support needed to engage in sustained, face-to-face community outreach and to nurture, coordinate, and facilitate the 2.5-year developmental process. The start-up process, governing principles, activities, challenges, and lessons learned are described. Lessons Learned: Since its inception, PARCC established core work groups, a governance structure, operating principles, research training activities, community health education projects, and several PARCC-affiliated research projects. Organizations across the spectrum of developmental capacity were major contributors to PARCC. The success of PARCC was based on committed and trusted leadership, preexisting relationships, trust among members from the community and academia, research training, extensive time commitment of members to the coalition’s work, and rapid development of work group activities. Conclusions: Building a CBPR coalition from the ground up involving organizations of diverse size and at various stages of development presents unique challenges that can be overcome with committed leadership, clear governance principles, and appropriate infrastructure. Engagement in community-based research during the early stages, while still developing trust, structure, and governance procedures can be accomplished as long as training of all partners is conducted and the trust building is not ignored.

Developing measures of community-relevant outcomes for violence prevention programs: A community-based participatory research approach to measurement

Community-Based Participatory Research is a research paradigm that encourages community participation in designing and implementing evaluation research, though the actual outcome measures usually reflect the “external” academic researchers’ view of program effect and the policy-makers’ needs for decision-making. This paper describes a replicable process by which existing standardized psychometric scales commonly used in youth-related intervention programs were modified to measure indicators of program success defined by community partners. This study utilizes a secondary analysis of data gathered in the context of a community-based youth violence prevention program. Data were retooled into new measures developed using items from the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire, the Hare Area Specific Self-Esteem Scale, and the Youth Asset Survey. These measures evaluated two community-defined outcome indicators, “More Parental Involvement” and “Showing Kids Love.” Results showed that existing scale items can be re-organized to create measures of community-defined outcomes that are psychometrically reliable and valid. Results also show that the community definitions of parent or parenting caregivers exemplified by the two indicators are similar to how these constructs have been defined in previous research, but they are not synonymous. There are nuanced differences that are important and worthy of better understanding, in part through better measurement.

Digital Animation as a Method to Disseminate Research Findings to the Community Using a Community-Based Participatory Approach

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has garnered increasing interest over the previous two decades as researchers have tackled increasingly complex health problems. In academia, professional presentations and articles are major ways that research is disseminated. However, dissemination of research findings to the people and communities who participated in the research is many times forgotten. In addition, little scholarly literature is focused on creative dissemination of research findings to the community using CBPR methods. We seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing an exemplar of research dissemination and partnership strategies that were used to complete this project. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the dissemination of research findings to our targeted communities through digital animation. We also provide the foundational thinking and specific steps that were taken to select this specific dissemination product development and distribution strategy.

The value of conducting door-to-door surveys

This paper argues that door-to-door surveys are a valuable tool for collecting information about health and the environment in urban areas in a manner consistent with community-based participatory research principles. We describe in detail how a door-to-door survey on food shopping and physical activity was conducted with the primary food shopper in 514 households on 30 randomly selected blocks in West and Southwest Philadelphia over seven weeks during the summer of 2010. We identify the elements of our door-to-door protocol that had benefits for the quality of the data collected, flow of data collection, the perceived safety of interviewers and residents, and that informed subsequent phases of this multimethod four-year study of urban food and physical activity environments. We conclude that door-to-door surveys are appropriate and valuable in certain research contexts, when spending time in a community, conducting observations and building relationships are central to the goals and success of a study.

Social cognitions, distress, and leadership self-efficacy: associations with aggression for high-risk minority youth

Urban ethnic minority youth are often exposed to high levels of aggression and violence. As such, many aggression intervention programs that have been designed with suburban nonethnic minority youth have been used or slightly adapted in order to try and meet the needs of high-risk urban youth. The current study contributes to the literature base by examining how well a range of social-cognitive, emotional distress and victimization, and prosocial factors are related to youth aggression in a sample of urban youth. This study utilized data gathered from 109 9- to 15-year-old youth (36.7% male; 84.4% African American) and their parents or caregivers. A series of hierarchical multiple regressions were fit predicting youth aggression from social-cognitive variables, victimization and distress, and prosocial variables, controlling for youth gender and age. Each set of variables explained a significant and unique amount of the variance in youth aggressive behavior. The full model including all predictors accounted for 41% of the variance in aggression. Models suggest that youth with stronger beliefs supportive of violence, youth who experience more overt victimization, and youth who experience greater distress in overtly aggressive situations are likely to be more aggressive. In contrast, youth with higher self-esteem and youth who endorse greater leadership efficacy are likely to be less aggressive. Contrary to hypotheses, hostile attributional bias and knowledge of social information processing, experience of relational victimization, distress in relationally aggressive situations, and community engagement were not associated with aggression. Our study is one of the first to address these important questions for low-income, predominately ethnic minority urban youth, and it has clear implications for adapting aggression prevention programs to be culturally sensitive for urban African American youth.

The Importance of Family to Youth Living in Violent Communities

The purpose of this study was to investigate family functioning in the relationship between community violence exposure and 1) self-esteem and 2) confrontational coping in a sample of urban youth. Adhering to the tenets of community based participatory research, academic and community partners collaborated on a cross-sectional study with 110 community dwelling urban youth, ages 10–16 living in a city located in the Northeastern United States. As part of a larger survey, this analysis included selected items on lifetime community violence exposure, family functioning, self-esteem and use of confrontational coping strategies in response to community violence. Over 90% of the youth reported some type of lifetime community violence exposure. Controlling for age and gender, older youth and those with healthier family functioning had higher self-esteem; community violence exposure was not associated with self-esteem. Healthier family functioning was associated with decreased use of confrontational coping, though increasing amounts of community violence exposure was still associated with increased confrontational coping. Family can be protective in violent environments. Results from this study directly informed an intervention aimed at youth violence prevention. This study highlights how psychiatric and mental health nurses may be able to address the complex interplay of factors for youth living in violent environments.

Methods for linking community views to measureable outcomes in a youth violence prevention program.

Background: All parties in community–academic partnerships have a vested interest prevention program success. Markers of success that reflect community’s experiences of programmatic prevention success are not always measurable, but critically speak to community-defined needs. Objective: The purpose of this manuscript was to (1) describe our systematic process for linking locally relevant community views (community-defined indicators) to measurable outcomes in the context of a youth violence prevention program and (2) discuss lessons learned, next steps, and recommendations for others trying to replicate a similar process. Methods: A research team composed of both academic and community researchers conducted a systematic process of matching community-defined indicators of youth violence prevention programmatic success to standardized youth survey items being administered in the course of a program evaluation. The research team of three community partners and five academic partners considered 43 community-defined indicators and 208 items from the youth surveys being utilized within the context of a community-based aggression prevention program. At the end of the matching process, 92 youth survey items were identified and agreed upon as potential matches to 11 of the community-defined indicators. Conclusions: We applied rigorous action steps to match community-defined indicators to survey data collected in the youth violence prevention intervention. We learned important lessons that inform recommendations for others interested in such endeavors. The process used to derive and assess community-defined indicators of success emphasized the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and use of existing and available data to reduce participant burden.

Podcast Interview Transcript

In each volume of Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, the PCHP editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript podcast interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides authors with the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. Beyond the Manuscript podcasts are available for download on the journal’s web site (www.press.jhu.edu/journals/pchp). The following Beyond the Manuscript podcast features Steve Leff and Nicole Thomas, co-authors of “Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Develop the PARTNERS Youth Violence Prevention Program,” which appears in a special issue focused on community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to youth violence prevention. This special issue is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guest editor Catherine Bradshaw conducted the interview. The following is an edited transcript of the Beyond the Manuscript podcast.