Grants and residencies

Research

Community engagement and participatory qualitative research in Soweto, South Africa

Application summary

Community engagement and participatory approaches play an increasingly important role in public health research but their significance for participating individuals or communities, and ethical implementation of such practices, are not well understood in settings characterised by inequality. The primary aim of this project is therefore to develop a multi-perspective understanding of community engagement in the context of ongoing public health research in Soweto, South Africa, and to explore appropriate, feasible and meaningful community engagement and participatory research approaches in this setting. A multi-method, interdisciplinary social scientific approach comprising participatory research approaches, relationship-building, piloting of community engagement events and activities, and exploratory qualitative research into the experiences and expectations attached to community engagement will be utilised. The project will thus inform best practices for meaningful and ethical community engagement in future public health research and interventions in South Africa. In addition, through collaboration with and mentoring of junior research staff, the project will contribute to further development of qualitative and participatory research capacity in the host research unit.

This project built on more theoretically oriented work previously undertaken during pandemic restrictions in South Africa. With more opportunities to meet with community stakeholders and organisations in person, this project was able to capture multiple perspectives on past, present and future community engagement in the context of health research. Dialogue events, community events, workshops and qualitative interviews were carried out in order to understand how different actors have experienced and would improve relationships between communities and researchers. One of the key findings was the crucial role played by community members who also work in research as brokers of community-research institution relationships. This brokerage in itself is not surprising, but its improvised nature and reliance on individual efforts and ethics in the absence of sufficient institutional support for community engagement practices is important to note in pursuing more ethical practices in health research. Interviews with different stakeholders further highlighted the tensions that arise from different, even opposing, expectations held towards academic research by different actors, including researchers themselves. Recommendations from this research include i) for researchers (particularly those with tenure and seniority) to pursue flexibility that can best accommodate community input and preferences, and ii) to favour longer term partnerships with community organisations or other stakeholders in order to benefit the communities and minimise the inherent risks (e.g., undue inducement) arising from the different logics of research and community activities. These partnerships need to benefit the organisations in some way, and e.g., providing research/evaluation expertise and support is one avenue to do so without introducing payments or material contributions, which may introduce more complicated ethical dimensions.

Back to Grants listing