Benefits of Community-Engaged Research

Community engaged research is a powerful approach to research that brings TOGETHER a combination of people to find out what works to improve the health of a community. The partners in this approach include people who live in a community, work in clinics, programs, or agencies, and researchers from universities. 

Benefits to Community Members

• People in the community can help focus attention on important health issues that may affect a lot of people.
• Community members can focus attention on what is important to them, and help decide what will be studied and what will be done with the information.
• There can be opportunities to try things that have been proven to work in other communities, and to adapt them to their own community.

Benefits to Community Partners

• Organizations can see and show others that their programs are working.
• The partnership brings together many ideas and areas of expertise to accomplish more than what organizations might have been able to do on their own.
• People who work for organizations can learn how to build research into their work.
• Staff can see how their voices and experiences are important to solving community-wide problems.

Benefits to University Partners

• Researchers can spend their time and expertise on issues that are most important to communities.
• Results mean more because the process has included a wide variety of experiences, opinions, expertise, and knowledge.
• Researchers learn more about local services and resources.
• Researchers can take what they know about evidence-based practices for a health topic, and apply it to help more people in real-life situations.
• Researchers learn from the experiences and perspectives of community partners.