Community-Academic Partnerships

Community-academic partnerships are relationships often formed to resolve an issue requiring academic, technical, and theoretical knowledge as well as community indigenous and experiential knowledge.

From a bird’s-eye view, community-aca­demic partnerships resemble small groups in four ways: (1) three or more people yet small enough so that each member can be easily identified as being present or absent from meetings; (2) regular and ongoing interaction such as meetings and/ or electronic correspondence; (3) having a shared purpose (in intervention-oriented community-academic partnerships, the pur­pose is research with project goals such as policy and/or behavior change); and (4) some form of interdependence (Gastil & Sprain, 2011). Interdependence refers to the extent to which one member’s interactional outcomes are based on another member’s actions. Boon and Holmes (1991) suggest that the degree of interdependence is directly proportional to the relevance of trust—the greater amount of interdependence means the greater need for trust. For example, if a community member wants to read a recent journal article but does not own a subscription, the academic member may locate and share the article since the uni­versity library does subscribe to the journal.

In addition to being small groups, these partnerships are IO, meaning that representa­tives from two or more organizations/agencies work collaboratively to achieve a common goal. The benefit of establishing IO partner­ships is to incorporate different perspectives of an issue while exploring solutions, espe­cially where innovation is needed (Newell & Swan, 2000). Innovation is necessary in community-academic collaborations to advance and disseminate knowledge while engaging communities.

A wide range of community engagement research models and community-academic collaborations exist. Community engagement (CE) spans a spectrum from simply providing information to consultation to active participa­tion and community-driven research (Arnstein, 1969; Clinical and Translational Science Awards Consortium, 2011; Queensland Government, 2005). Information sharing is a one-way relationship devoid of public par­ticipation. Relevant information is determined by academics or government and then dis­seminated to community members through a range of media, including telephone, publica­tions, and websites, as well as education and awareness activities. Consultation is a rela­tionship in which community/consumer views on programs or services are actively sought out. Effective consultation occurs when there is a shared understanding of how community input will be used and timely feedback to par­ticipants about the final outcome is provided. In a model of active participation, community members are sought out as full participants, recognizing the role that community has in shaping programs and services. Active partici­pation enables communities to raise their own issues and contribute to solutions. The type of community-academic partnership further influences the range of CE models.

It would be unrealistic to suggest that a typical community-academic partnership exists, although from the authors’ experience, these partnerships do share characteristics of diversity, virtual work environments, fund­ing sources, and motivation for participation.

Relationships lacking a clear decision-mak­ing or approval process are vulnerable to being guided by two or more governance or manage­ment structures. In other words, community governance guides community members, and organizational/university members are guided by the rules and regulations of their respec­tive institutions. Ring (1997) alerts us to this problem, and conflicts may arise due to lack of traditional hierarchical relationships and governance related to IO networks. Weiner, Alexander, and Shortell (2002) investigated governance and management capabilities in coalitions—a type of community-academic partnership. They found that perceived clarity and consistency in decision making, as well as collaboration in conflict resolution, resulted in greater involvement and partnership longevity. Similarly, Owens, Andrew, Collins, Griffeth, and Mahoney (2011) found that membership entities had different operating policies and incentive structures, which made it difficult to advance their project. As a remedy, they suggest creating an information packet with key policies that prioritize decision making. Without clear understanding or agreements between members and organizations about governance, conflict within partnerships will arise during the research process, stalling the project and potential action. The next sec­tion discusses conflict at both the micro- and macrolevels.