Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
Broadly defined, community-based research (CBR) is a process of conducting research that embraces and integrates the participation and local knowledge of people in communities and organizations with the goal of informing efforts to achieve social change. Although several publications on CBR exist, they primarily focus on processes, methods, and tools for developing and implementing CBR projects. This special issue of the Journal of Rural Social Sciences builds from that knowledge base, analyzes the outcomes of real-world CBR projects, and assesses learning outcomes for students, faculty, organizations, and community residents. This introduction to the special issue provides an overview of the academic and practical applications of community-based research that aim to achieve learning outcomes and social change for both university- and community-based partners. It includes a review of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches comprising CBR, followed by a summary of the articles in this issue.
The idea for developing this collection of individual works on community-based research (CBR) evolved from a workshop at the 2009 annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society (RSS) held in Madison, Wisconsin, entitled "Community-based Research: Documenting and Learning from Project Outcomes." The workshop was organized and facilitated by John J. Green and Randy Stoecker, two sociologists with experience in designing and implementing CBR initiatives. Several contributors to this special issue participated in the RSS workshop and were subsequently invited, along with others, to develop manuscripts drawing from their experiences as students, practitioners, and professors working with communitybased and non-governmental organizations through a variety of development initiatives.
The guest editors of this issue, representing the disciplines of community development, sociology, public policy, and demography, have been involved in numerous collaborative CBR projects, over the past ten years, through the Institute for Community-Based Research (ICBR), which originated at Delta State University and now operates primarily through the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi. Their work has focused on documenting and evaluating the needs, interests, and recommendations of service providers following Hurricane Katrina and those of minority and limited-resource farmers in several states; the education and workforce training needs expressed by underemployed women; and other projects with organizations throughout the Mississippi Delta and Gulf Coast regions addressing issues of poverty, education, transportation, access to health care, and sustainable development....