Black community members-as-researchers: working with community groups in the research process.
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Abstract
This paper will explore the experience of two sets of research projects involving members of black and minority ethnic communities in the role of researchers. The projects involved working with groups, first, in providing support and advice to groups as a whole; second, in approaching respondents as a group; third, in the project’s concern with communities of interest (communities potentially affected by sickle cell and thalassaemia in Leicester) as well as geographically defined communities (the refugee Somali community in Tower Hamlets). Learning points to emerge include the importance of research diaries and de-briefing workshops in community research, and the importance of this reflexive data in reports; the importance of devolving organizational aspects of research to community members; the benefits of interested partisan community researchers contrasted to disinterested ‘objective’ professionals; the attention required to health and safety and quality of research materials in planning research; the importance of revealing contextual production of all research reports to commissioners; the features mitigating in favour of successful collaboration between academics and community researchers; the nature of the required commitments to feedback; and the limits to further pressurising clients who live in challenging social circumstances.