The Swearer Center staff is available to consult on any aspect of engaged research; contact Julie Plaut, Director of Engaged Scholarship.

Additional resources include:

• Advance Rhode Island Clinical and Translational Research (Advance RI-CTR): a valuable source of funding and support for scholars focused on health
• Annenberg Institute for School Reform: a leader in research-practice partnerships focused on K-12 education (including within Rhode Island)
• Broader Impacts Working Group: this group is dedicated to supporting faculty in developing research proposals that include community-engaged BI activities; it includes representatives of the Office of Research Strategy and Development, the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Library, the Swearer Center and other units
• Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics: a compilation of publications and training resources from NSF- and NIH-funded initiatives, addressing human subjects protections, ethics, and cultural competence in community-based and participatory research
• In addition to consultations with staff, key Swearer Center resources for engaged research include:
  • Principles and Recommended Practices for Equitable, Effective Collaboration
  • Recommended Practices for Developing Community Partnerships
  • Engaged Teaching outlines resources that can help you to integrate your engaged research into your courses.
  • Resources and Opportunities-Policies and Guidance page for legal and logistical information related to collaboration
• Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRAs): faculty can apply to have undergraduate students funded to collaborate with them on engaged research projects
• While the University’s internal research funding does not focus on engaged research, some engaged faculty at Brown have applied successfully for Salomon Research Awards and other seed grants. The Swearer Center offers Engaged Research Mini-Grants for undergraduate and graduate students’ expenses for conducting or presenting on engaged research.
• Some Rhode Island community-based organizations also have substantial experience and expertise in participatory research and collaborate with faculty and students at Brown. Camilo Viveiros of the George Wiley Center, for instance, has collaborated with faculty and students in multiple disciplines and presented at events, including a 2023 panel about community-engaged scholarship at IBES.

Know of a community priority or project? Share the opportunity through the Community Partnership Interest form.

For grounding yourself in basic definitions, principles and approaches, we recommend the following resources:

• In It Together: Community-Based Research Guidelines for Communities and Higher Education (Community Research Collaborative, 2021).
• Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities Tuck, E. (2009), Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409-427.
• Community-Based Research and Higher Education: Principles and Practices, Strand et al.
• The Swearer Center’s principles and recommended practices for effective, equitable collaboration.

Many resources on research partnerships in education and health can also be useful to researchers in other fields; examples include:

• The National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships has created a Knowledge Clearinghouse with FAQs and materials on 12 key topics.
• Campus-Community Partnerships for Health ​created an extensive evidence-based curriculum, Developing and Sustaining Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships: A Skill-Building Curriculum.
• Community Engagement Alliance Consultative Resource (CEACR) toolkits:
  • Engagement Methodologies: Participant Appreciation Practices
  • Trustworthiness and Research Reciprocity
  • Best Practices for Community Partner Compensation

If you understand the basics of engaged research and want to start developing research partnerships, recommended resources include:

• The Community Impact Statement: A Tool for Developing Healthy Partnerships (Gust & Jordan, 2006)
• George Mason University’s Individual Action Plan worksheet to develop an anti-racist research plan
• The Urban Institute encourages researchers to conduct a Data Walk as a first experience with collaboration

Whether you use quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods in your research, you can adopt a participatory approach. In addition to drawing on the resources above, you might start by: 

• Exploring approaches and methods in this Stakeholder Engagement Navigator
• Reviewing this Participatory Action Research Map from The Public Science Project 

Additional Resources:

• Data equity and sovereignty: First Nations Principles of OCAP, CDC Foundation Principles of Data Equity
• Using logic models to develop evaluation metrics: see Partnerships for Environmental Public Health Evaluation Metrics Manual for example.
• For quantitative research: the Urban Institute’s Increasing the Rigor of Quantitative Research with Participatory and Community-Engaged Methods: A Participatory and Quantitative Methods Guidebook (Sonia Torres Rodríguez et al., October 2023)
• Ross, Lainie Friedman, et al. “Human Subjects Protections in Community-Engaged Research: A Research Ethics Framework” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 2010, pp. 5–17. DOI: 10.1525/jer.2010.5.1.5

“Even the act of evaluating the quantity and quality of community engagement can contribute to strengthening relationships and improving communication. Such evaluations can help provide benchmarks for the state of the partnership, as well as provide indicators of which factors/principles need more attention.”. 

“What We’ve Learned About Approaches to Community Engaged Research”, (Evidence in Action, based on interview with Dr. Melody Goodman) 

Engaged research project assessment can not only document results but also foster learning, authenticity, equity and co-creation of knowledge:

• Imagining America’s Democratically Engaged Assessment: Reimagining the Purposes and Practices of Assessment in Community Engagement
• Equitable Evaluation Initiative’s “Equitable Evaluation Framework” includes principles, orthodoxies, mindsets, tensions and sticking points
• Engage for Equity’s reflection and evaluation tools
• New York University’s Research Engagement Survey Tool (REST) was developed to assess the quality of engagement in health research but is adaptable to other fields
• The National Academy of Medicine provides an excellent set of assessment instruments aligned with its Assessing Community Engagement Conceptual Model
• Arora, Prerna G., et al. "Measuring Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships: The Initial Development of an Assessment Instrument." Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, vol. 9 no. 4, 2015, p. 549-560. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2015.0077