Community-Based Research and Methods in Community Practice

Community-Based Research and Methods in Community Practice

In recent years, community practice has generated a great amount of interest from social work scholars and practitioners. Broadly defined as actively engaging and working with people where they live, community practice has been recognized as a promising means for problem solving and capacity building at the local level (Weil, 1996).

One major component that characterizes this new form of practice is the call for better use of research to inform program and policy development (Coulton, 1995). However, despite the growing interest, the use of research in community practice has not received the same level of attention as the practice itself. In addition, there seems to be confusion regarding how research should be integrated into community practice. Therefore, the questions of what community-based research is and how to use it to guide practice must be better addressed.

Community-based research is as much about communities as it is for them. Unlike other forms of social science research that develop abstract theory or rigorously formulate cause-and-effect relationships for hypothesis-testing purposes, research that is community based aims to apply methods of data collection and analysis to generate findings that have highly practical results. The audience for such findings is typically made up of community members, practitioners, and local policymakers who wish to design an intervention that benefits a geography- or population-based community (Kingsley, McNeely, & Gibson, 1997). Typically, the [Page 605]goal of community-based research at this level of practice is to define problems and needs in a community and, increasingly, to define local resources for managing such needs (Tatian, 2000).

Traditional research approaches can be differentiated by methodological orientation. For example, quantitative data can be analyzed using simple descriptive or more complicated inferential statistical techniques, whereas technically sophisticated qualitative research analyses use theory-building approaches such as symbolic interactionism or grounded theory. Each approach to research is rooted in epistemological preferences about how we know what we know, the theoretical justifications of which can spiral upward toward even more abstract levels. Because community-based research is less concerned with epistemological differences than practical relevance, its objective is not only to produce and argue for the most “accurate” form of truth, but to ensure that whatever truth is sought is important to community members and policymakers who will organize around it. This practical objective of community-based research thus makes common distinctions of quantitative versus qualitative methods of data collection less relevant than for other forms of research overview.

We argue that a more relevant framework for comprehending community-based research is one that locates research methods within their practice objective. In community practice, such objectives vary widely. Based on the work of Chaskin, Venkatsh, Vidal, and Brown (2001), we identify three primary objectives of community practice that work to improve the lives of community members. Each of these practice objectives shapes the research question as well as the researcher's approach to data collection. This chapter first describes these three overall objectives in community work. It then describes various common sources of data that can be used across almost all three functions of community work, depending on suitability. Finally, it contextualizes methods of data collection and practical data analysis by outlining various uses for data and analysis that depend on the objective of practice.

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