It’s a sprint,not a marathon: a case for building short-term partnerships for community-based participatory research

Abstract

Academic calendars and university timelines set an urgent pace for researchers, which can hinder the establishment of long-term community partnerships. Given community-based participatory research’s (CBPR) emphasis on community-led research, time constraints can inhibit academic researchers’ commitments to collaborative methodologies and participatory research. This article considers how CBPR can be adapted for shorter-term engagements while still producing mutually beneficial research. In doing so, we contribute to the existing corpus on rapid assessment methodologies, characterized for adopting methods traditionally practiced over a longer duration to shorter time frames. We review the successes and limitations of a CBPR project executed within the timespan of six months in Flint, Michigan. In the case discussed, photo-voice enabled the inclusion of diverse ways of knowing, horizontal partnerships, reciprocal learning, and an accessible disemmination format within a CBPR framework. In conclusion we assert that there is value in short-term CBPR, especially for emergent issues where there is a need for rapid, responsive methodologies. However, short-term CBPR is a sprint, rather than a marathon; although shorter in duration, it is more intensive. It requires significant methodological commitments, flexibility, and an intensified workload for those involved.

Keywords

community-based participatory research CBPR photovoice participation knowledge co-production participatory pedagogy feminist pedagogy water Flint

Introduction

Community based participatory research (CBPR) is a methodological orientation that emphasizes connecting research to action by making findings accessible and applicable, recognizing plural ways of knowing by incorporating the expertise of research participants, challenging hierarchical power relations by sharing decision-making among partners throughout the research, and engaging everyone involved in reciprocal learning of mutual benefit (Israel et al., 1998; Strand et al., 2003; Tobias et al., 2013). To pursue these goals many authors emphasize the value of long-term research engagements, building lasting relationships with research participants, and commitment to continued work in a given site or with a specific population (Austin, 2004; Israel et al., 2003; Menzies, 2004; Wallerstein and Duran, 2003). What has not been sufficiently visible in the literature is that emphasizing long-term research engagements runs counter to the constraints facing researchers and graduate students at most universities. In academia, short-term evaluations, funding deadlines, and tenure and promotion pressures set an urgent pace, hindering the establishment of long-term partnerships. Graduate students face further constraints due to program requirements, funding dependencies and departmental obligations (Mannay and Morgan, 2015; Mills and Ratcliffe 2012; Rawat and Mina 2014). These limitations should not stunt a commitment to CBPR. This paper explores research practices that allow the goals of CBPR to be pursued through shorter-term partnerships between academic researchers and community members.

Short-term research endeavors are particularly important in the context of emergent problems requiring generation of timely and usable data to inform policies or programs. The ethical and practical challenges of conducting short-term research have been primarily discussed within development and health literatures. To reduce the time and costs of large questionnaires and in-depth ethnography, practitioners and researchers in the 1970s developed techniques to elicit data over a period of weeks. One prominent early approach was Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) where agendas external to the local community defined the research and controlled the resulting data. RRA was critiqued for its extractive nature and ultimately dropped in favor of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. PRA draws on a heterogeneous repertoire of techniques that usually entail group meetings and involve locals in the facilitation, data collection, analysis and presentation of findings (Chambers, 1997; Coghlan and Brydon-Miller, 2014). In principle, PRA differs from RRA in that it values local knowledge as the basis for program design and implementation. Similarly, Rapid Ethnographic Appraisal (REA) was developed to elicit cultural values and provide data on locally constructed representations of community needs and resources (Low et al., 2005; Taplin et al., 2002). Rooted in ethnographic theory and methods, REA can produce rich understandings of social and economic factors in emerging situations. Proponents advocate putting ethnography to the benefit of the communities involved, inserting it into a mixed-method approach, and involving community members throughout the process (Sangaramoothy and Kroeger, 2020).

These approaches can be collectively referred to as rapid assessment methodologies, adapting long-term methods to be ‘sprints’ instead. While they share the shorter-term timeline, PRA and REA emphasize the need to be flexible in adapting the project to the community rather than prioritizing efficiency and achievement of objectives set a priori by external actors (Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger, 2020; Townsley, 1996). Yet all have been critiqued as ‘quick and dirty’ substitutes for meaningful engagement with communities, for downplaying structural limitations to participation and the heterogeneity of communities, and for lacking critical engagement with the power relations between researchers and participants (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Cornwall and Pratt, 2011; Richards, 1995).

Community-researcher partnerships are exalted in CBPR scholarship, but less so in rapid assessment methodologies because such partnerships usually demand time investments (Sangaramoothy and Kroeger, 2020; Townsley, 1996). Partnerships require making space for community members to be decision-makers and equal collaborators, rather than mere ‘participants’ in the research. University-community partnerships involve identifying and working towards a common goal, establishing and maintaining relationships of mutual benefit, developing equitable group dynamics, and demonstrating effectiveness through results (Austin, 2004). While we endorse the motivating values and general desirability of long-term partnerships for CBPR, we are also conscious of its practical limitations.

In this article we analyze a CBPR project executed within the timespan of six months and evaluate photo-voice as a key method for developing a short-term partnership in CBPR. To frame the goals for our project, we drew from both PRA and CBPR literatures. While PRA emphasizes the need to be flexible, adapting the project to the community, we attempted to adapt our project strategies to the shorter timeline of a university course. In doing so, we sought to combine the rapidity of PRA with the CBPR tenets of (1) research into action, (2) plural ways of knowing, (3) shared decision-making, and (4) mutual benefit. The critical question underlying this decision was, can short-term research projects implement these best practices? We argue that they can, with some limitations, and that photo-voice is a conducive methodology for achieving the above-stated goals.

What is photo-voice?

Over the last decade photo-voice has increased in popularity among academics and practitioners as a data collection and community engagement method (Catalani and Minkler, 2010; Coemans et al., 2019; Derr and Simons, 2019). In a photo-voice project, participants take photos that represent a particular issue. Depending on the project, the research topic could be collectively identified by participants or predefined by researchers. After taking pictures, participants are prompted to discuss what the images mean to them, either as a group or individually through interviews. Either way, the objective is to elicit a narrative of the participant’s understanding of the topic. As initially developed, a core component of this method is the dissemination of the images and narratives to stimulate community discussion and influence decision-makers (Wang and Burris, 1997). This method draws on feminist theory, Paulo Freire’s critical educational approach, and participatory action research (see Milne and Muir 2020).

Our research is influenced by feminist epistemologies which view knowledge as socially constructed and shaped by diverse experiences; this in turn challenges a problematic expert hierarchy that reinforces oppression (Crabtree and Sapp, 2003). The originators of photo-voice embraced this priority by conducting research ‘by and with women’ instead of ‘on women’ (Wang and Burris, 1997). Rather than positioning the researcher as the sole expert, photo-voice challenges mainstream research traditions by engaging participants as knowledge producers. Doing so values diverse ways of knowing and addresses the distribution of power between researchers and the researched. In fact, these labels become passé. The majority of photo-voice research is conducted in partnership with community organizations (Castleden et al., 2008), and applications are not limited to women. Over time this method has been engaged to explore the needs and elevate the knowledge of vulnerable populations, including homeless people (Wang et al., 2000), people with disabilities (Jurkowski and Paul-Ward, 2007), and people living with HIV/AIDS (Teti et al., 2012). Challenges of using photovoice include risk of photography in certain contexts, representation and ownership over photographs, and limited decision-making by participants (Catalani and Minkler, 2010; Hergenrather et al., 2009; Luttrell and Chalfen, 2010). Bellow we offer a detailed description of our process and how our team worked together to mitigate these issues.

Our partnership

Cognizant that a researchers’ positionality informs the research process, from development of research question to interactions with participants (England, 1994), we briefly introduce ourselves. Lucero Radonic and Rowenn Kalman have doctoral degrees in cultural anthropology, and Cara Jacob is a graduate student in the same field. Kalman and Jacob are white Americans, and Radonic is Hispanic. At the onset of this partnership they had not worked in Flint. As residents of the Greater Lansing Area −50 miles from Flint– they had not experienced the effects of the austerity measures impacting Flint’s majority African American residents, including the water crisis. E. Yvonne Lewis is African-American and has degrees in Business Administration and Clinical/Community Psychology. She is a community organizer, primarily in the non-profit sector. As a resident of Flint for over 40 years, she had first-hand experience of the water crisis. All authors are women.

Radonic and Lewis were put in contact through the co-director of Michigan State University’s Center for Gender in Global Context. Radonic was redesigning the methods course for the university’s Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change specialization and sought to train graduate students in CBPR for environmental justice. Lewis, the co-director of the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center – Community Core, saw value in educating novice researchers since the issues experienced in Flint continue to draw scholarly attention. Both were concerned with the gendered dimensions of water access and committed to establishing equitable relationships between community and academia. Lewis, who is active in local health research and outreach programs, was also aware that there was a lack of attention to the effects of water insecurity on women, and this is something that worried many Flint residents (Grossman and Slusky, 2019).

The partnership developed among the following groups: (1) The university’s ‘academic researchers’, (2) the Flint ‘community researchers’, and (3) the ‘research participants’. ‘Academic researchers’ consists of Radonic, Jacob, and Kalman and the students in Radonic’s course¹. ‘Community researchers’ includes Lewis and two Flint-based professional practitioners involved in different capacities with Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center (HFRCC). Through their professional practice community researchers had health-related research experience, so Radonic provided supplementary training on qualitative methods and photo-voice. ‘Research participants’ were the individuals involved through the photo-voice methodology. Bergold and Thomas (2012) separate participatory research into two types of collaboration: between university researchers and professional practitioners, and between university researchers and people immediately affected by the research theme (i.e. marginalized groups). Our case spans this dichotomy due to overlap between groups: The community researchers were professional practitioners and part of the impacted group, and some of the research participants were also professionals.

Our partnership emerged to address three goals. First, to contribute to scholarship on the gendered dimensions of water insecurity in high-income countries by documenting its manifestations in Flint. Second, to raise awareness among local decision-makers and the research community of urgent issues identified by women in Flint. Third, to expand ethical research practices by engaging students and community members in CBPR. To meet these goals our partnership organized around a photo-voice project documenting grassroots narratives about the impact of the water crisis on the lives of Flint women. This participatory method furthered our common goals by collecting qualitative data on experiences of water insecurity, involving students and community members in the research process, and creating a photo-exhibit for dissemination. All parties understood that our partnership would be short-term, but without foreclosing future collaborations.

Study context

In 2014, the City of Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron, provided by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), to the Flint River. This change, and specifically how it was managed, resulted in contamination of the drinking water supply by lead and pathogens. Soon after the switch, residents raised concerns about potable water quality, but their evidence was dismissed and countered by state experts who attested to its safety (Davis et al., 2016). Residents’ persistent activism attracted university researchers whose data forced state authorities to declare a state of emergency and switch back to Detroit water in 2016 (Stanley, 2016).

One recurrent phrase we heard from Flint residents during our research was ‘I don’t trust it’, with the subject applying to Flint’s water, the water management system, and expert research on water. This erosion of trust is rooted in a history of racialized urban inequality and the contemporary failure of democracy facilitated through urban austerity measures tied to Flint’s financial struggles (Pauli, 2019; Sadler and Highsmith, 2016). Structural racism in the housing laws of the 1950s, led to racially motivated disinvestment starting in the 1960s, causing Flint’s population and economy to shrink drastically. As the racial demographics of the city shifted, the tax base dropped due to racialized pay inequity (Highsmith, 2015; Sadler and Lafreniere, 2017). During this same period unemployment rose, and by 2010 the rate was 4.4% above the national average (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019, n.d.; US Census Bureau, 1962).

In response to Flint’s economic problems the state invoked control by appointing a non-elected emergency manager who decided to switch municipal water from the DWSD to the Flint River to reduce cost and balance the budget (Fasenfest, 2019). This decision did not consider the industrial pollution of the Flint River, nor the age and disrepair of the city’s water treatment infrastructure, which had not been updated since the 1970s (Pauli, 2019). As a result of the switch, households came to depend on bottled and/or filtered water for drinking, preparing food, brushing their teeth, and bathing (Radonic and Jacob, 2021).

Implementation of our photo-voice project

The first step in our photo-voice project was to produce a research question identified by community members and worded with the guidance of the academic team. In an early planning meeting, Lewis invited women who had been affiliated with HFRCC in different capacities, several of whom would become the community researchers. We began by introducing photo-voice and examining guiding questions for other projects. Examples illustrated that a ‘good’ photo-voice question must (a) focus on a single issue; (b) be open-ended; (c) be clear and specific to avoid misinterpretation; (d) be relevant to the lives of participants; and (e) be answerable through pictures. Keeping this in mind, the women discussed what they would like to learn about the water crisis. Their concerns were recorded on a flip chart, allowing common themes to emerge.

The group finally settled on the question: ‘As a woman, how does the water crisis affect you?’ Lewis and Radonic submitted a research proposal to HFRCC’s Community Ethics Review Board, and incorporated their recommendations. Under Lewis’s leadership, community researchers recruited research participants following a purposeful sampling approach. They recruited 16 women between the ages of 20 and 70 who had lived in Flint for at least two years prior to the onset of the crisis.

The first data collection activity was photography. Photo-voice manuals advise organizing multiple sessions to introduce participants to photo-voice and each other, train participants in photographic techniques, and allow for an iterative process of picture taking and dialogue (Palibroda et al., 2009). Community researchers were particularly concerned about participants’ limited time availability and advocated for organizing only one two-hour workshop to introduce participants to photo-voice, jointly establish a project timeline, and discuss ethics and techniques for photography. To place participants in control, we presented them with a proposed workflow and worked together to determine a timeline. This opened space to discuss issues of concern to participants, including worries about time demands, the implications of working with novice researchers (i.e. students), and concerns about being interviewed. As this discussion took longer than anticipated, we shortened the lesson on photographic techniques, offering only an overview of informed consent and advice on how to ethically take pictures. The majority of participants asked to use their smartphone cameras, rather than the digital cameras provided by the research team. The participants agreed on three weeks to take 10-20 photos. Photos were sent by email or text to the researchers, or the cameras were brought back to a local office and photographs downloaded there.

The second activity was individual semi-structured interviews². Interviews had two objectives. First, to learn more about women’s experiences with the water crisis and their coping strategies. Second, to elicit interpretation of the photographs. The academic researchers developed the interview guide and worked with community researchers to ensure question phrasing would minimize the risk of triggering trauma. As student training was one of the goals of our partnership, we had originally planned for students to conduct the interviews, but some participants questioned the students’ capacity to address sensitive topics that may emerge. ‘The water crisis has broken people; can they handle that?’ -one participant questioned at a meeting. Lewis reminded everyone that the students were trained, and that she trusted they would use care and respect. In group conversation we all decided that experienced interviewers would also be present at interviews. During interviews we gave participants printed copies of their pictures and asked them to select their favorite five, and to describe why they had taken each picture, what it showed, what it meant to them, what they wanted it to tell others, and to give it a title. This process elicited rich narratives about the pictures and offered a vantage point from which women could articulate their situated knowledge about this now-emblematic event.

During one interview, a participant included one picture she took during our first workshop (Figure 1). She titled it ‘Another workshop’ and explained to us: ‘When this all first happened, I used to hate it when somebody would come in and say ‘blah blah blah Water Crisis’, ‘duh duh duh Water Crisis’, ‘we need to have a meeting about the Water Crisis’. And every week I was going to two or three meetings. Everybody wants your time, ‘come to my meeting, I’m important’ (. . .) That’s how I feel about this water crisis, everyone wants to have their own. Everybody has their own agenda to get there’. Recognizing her research fatigue, the university researcher asked why she became involved in this project. The participant explained, ‘I think you’re trying to find a way to show everyone: this is what we found, there is a problem. This is what the people say the problem is, [and] not what we say the problem is’.

Figure 1.

Picture by Ms. Linda H.

The third research activity was data analysis. During a community-driven data-coding workshop, participants collaboratively identified themes from the photos. Each participant received a deck of all the ‘favorite’ photographs previously selected, sorted them into piles by themes of their choice, and then assigned a short descriptor to each pile. Every woman then shared with the group how they had organized the photos and what titles they chose. As we compared individual titles, collective themes emerged. We wrote them on a board for everyone to see and debate. Including participants in coding ensured that they informed how the data was analyzed. Academic researchers were able to synthesize the themes that emerged into more inclusive ones, with immediate feedback from participants about whether the summarization captured their experiences. For example, participants identified ‘creativity’ as a theme that was overlooked by researchers. Similarly, researchers pointed out that participants used the term ‘burden’ to encompass difficulties with lost time, finances, and health associated to acquiring water. Participants felt that combining these issues into a single theme of ‘burdens’ was an accurate synthesis. In this way, community-driven data coding allowed a productive dialog among academic researchers, community researchers, and participants in which mutual expertise was valued and incorporated into findings (Radonic and Jacob, 2021; Radonic et al., under review).

The final component was a public exhibit. At the initial meeting, community researchers were adamant that they and the participants should oversee the location and details for the exhibit. When, at the end of the project the university offered to host an additional exhibit, community researchers and participants welcomed the opportunity as it would allow them to reach one of their target audiences: the research community. The project sought to bring grassroots narratives of the water crisis to policy-makers and non-Flint residents researching in the area. For the exhibit academic researchers mounted 15 photographs that were selected and prioritized by participants. The photos were displayed with title and text descriptions created from transcripts, which were reviewed by the participant. Community researchers wanted to explore how non-Flint residents received the pictures, so the text was hidden under flaps. Attendees wrote down their interpretations of the image on a worksheet before lifting the flap to read the text. Attendees thus also became participants in knowledge generation by supplying interpretive data on the photographs. The photographs and display materials were given to community researchers for use in their future planned exhibits and were displayed at a community meeting in Flint.

Running the sprint: Adapting CBPR for short-term success

Photo-voice enabled successful short-term CBPR through the inclusion of diverse ways of knowing, horizontal partnerships, reciprocal learning, and an accessible dissemination format. In this section, we highlight the adaptations made for the ‘sprint’ model and subsequent tradeoffs. We first reflect on the methodological challenges faced and strategies used by the partnership to follow the principles of CBPR highlighted in the introduction. Second, we address the most salient practical limitations faced when conducting this research through a short-term partnership, and explain how these were handled.

Methodological challenges and adaptations

CBPR seeks to legitimize a plurality in ways of knowing by recognizing the expertise of participants. The literature on photo-voice provides many examples showing how well this method can counter the traditional expert hierarchy that positions researchers as knowers and participants as objects of study (Castleden et al., 2008; Robinson-Keilig et al., 2014; Thompson et al., 2016). Scholars have challenged the lay–expert divide by emphasizing expertise from lived experience and the culturally mediated character of expert knowledge (Wynne, 1996), but despite this conceptual progress, communities –especially historically marginalized ones– continue to find their evidence and experience dismissed (Checker, 2007). Instead of being seen as knowers, they are reduced to ‘sources’. In the context of the Flint water crisis, as Pauli (2019) relates, many residents felt that their embodied expertise and role as knowledge producers was eclipsed by inordinate attention to outside experts ‘discovering’ the water crisis. We found that photo-voice can counter this by centralizing the situated knowledge of participants. Community-driven coding was crucial for validating participants’ expertise as they analyzed their photographs and co-developed themes. In short, rather than positioning academic researchers as sole experts, photo-voice engaged participating women as experts of their own lives. At the end of the project women related that seeing their photographs and narratives displayed was a way of reclaiming space for their authoritative voice in what had become a crowded field of expert testimonies about their lives. As one participant reflected at the exhibit, ‘taking photographs made me think more intentionally about our reality. . . it was empowering to be able to document my concerns and call attention to them’.

Second, CBPR seeks to challenge hierarchical power relations by equitably involving community members in research through shared decision-making. In practice CBPR projects are extremely diverse in how participation is conceived, depending on the researchers’ vision, participants’ disposition towards it, the research structure, funding, and timelines. It is therefore important to distinguish between participation and shared decision-making. Just as community members can participate in a project without having a role as decision-makers, being decision-makers about the objectives and structure does not necessarily entail active participation at every stage. In fact, the maximalist approach to community participation may impose an unequal burden on community partners (Tobias et al., 2013).

Photo-voice is conducive to establishing a horizontal partnership through shared decision-making (Carlson et al., 2006; Castleden et al., 2008; Liebenberg, 2018). In our project, community members and university researchers engaged as collaborators to shape the inquiry from its origins. The guiding question was developed through dialogue between academic and community researchers, and consensus was required for final approval. With the research participants we collectively determined the timeline, and collected, analyzed, and disseminated findings. However, the degree of participation at each stage varied. Rather than assuming that community researchers wanted (and had the time) to engage in all stages of the project, we collectively created a work flow chart to clarify who should lead, who would participate, and in what dimension. For example, academic researchers led development of all methodological tools while community researchers undertook participant recruitment. It was agreed that the participants would be asked to commit to photo collection, one interview, and a workshop to discuss themes. The research participants made it clear that everyday life limited their availability, and negotiated a longer timeline for data-collection, while the academic and community researchers ensured the timeline would fit with the constraints of the semester and goals for the exhibit. Because participants determined to what degree and in which parts of the process they wished to engage, this set the stage for a deeply collaborative project that also respected the availability of participants and community research partners.

Third, CBPR seeks to connect research to action by making findings accessible and applicable. As Austin (2004) points out, successful academic-community partnerships involve demonstrating effectiveness through results. We recognized that our partnership needed to yield a tangible product for the community partners at the end of the project, but with a limited timeframe. These requirements attracted us to photo-voice. Photography provided our partnership with a final product that could be utilized in multiple ways. Surveys or interviews require extensive data analysis and writing to communicate research findings, while photo-voice does not require additional layers of translation and analysis by academic researchers for results to be meaningful to the public. Though some scholars raise concerns that the user-friendliness of photo-voice could lead to its misuse as a replacement for long-term ethnographic engagement (Gubrium and Harper, 2013), our aim was to maximize the effectiveness of short-term engagement because longer-term engagement was not possible.

Throughout the Flint water crisis, media outlets and university researchers have authoritatively framed and described the experiences of Flint residents. Photo-voice destabilized this authority. As Wang (2003) argues, photo-voice can influence how a community’s public presence is redefined and how social concerns are understood and responded to. A core goal of photo-voice is the dissemination of findings to inform policy and bring related social change (Wang and Buris, 1997). Scholars have drawn attention to the ethical responsibility of researchers in managing and meeting community expectations regarding change, highlighting the gap between the research and action components of photo-voice (Mitchell, 2015; Nykiforuk et al., 2011; Wang and Burris, 1994). From the onset, university researchers recognized that as newcomers they lacked the skills and connections to ensure the photo-voice project would inform policy. But community partners had the experience in public policy, local level networks, and a normative agenda towards water justice that provided them with the assets and motivation to disseminate the findings. Recognizing our own limitations and the complementarity of skills between partners was central to the success of our partnership. We agreed to create the photo-voice exhibit together, but community partners would have full control over the presentation of images and narratives. Thus, embedding photo-voice within a participatory framework transferred the representational power and responsibility to community members. This does not mean that university researchers stepped away entirely at this stage. University researchers helped organize the first exhibit and all partners remain in communication about possible venues for future exhibits.

Fourth, CBPR seeks to involve all partners in reciprocal learning for their mutual benefit. Our six months photo-voice allowed our academic-community partnership to work towards three goals that were of mutual benefit: create a record of women’s experiences with the water crisis, produce data to inform scholarship on water insecurity, and engage students in research. Our partnership was thus built on the basis of mutual learning. Community researchers valued how it yielded a tangible product – a public exhibit– for women to share their stories while creating much-needed documentation of the impacts of the water crisis on women. University researchers valued how it produced a data set to inform scholarship on water insecurity in the Global North. These mutually beneficial goals addressed a community identified need and a gap in the literature, respectively.

The principle investigators valued how this partnership fostered ethical research practices and mutual learning by bringing students and community members together into the research process. At the end of the project a participant highlighted this when explaining ‘I feel more confident that academic-community partnerships are preparing emerging researchers to be more sensitive to community-driven research agendas’. While a systematic evaluation of mutual learning was not our analytic goal, we asked those involved what they had learned from the project. On one hand, students reported how, in dialogue with participants, they were asked to reflect on their privilege as graduate students, as urban residents not experiencing austerity measures, and for many of them, as white Americans. This grounded theoretical conversations they had in the classroom about social power and positionality in which they unpacked the power relations that inhabit co-production of knowledge. On the other hand, community participants gained experience with scholarly research and qualitative research methods. For everyone involved, the project also highlighted the diverse ways community partners and participants exert power through the research process. The success of our partnership was greatly dependent on the assets, skills, and disposition of community members, as much as it was on the work of the university researchers and the robustness of our project design. As Caretta and Riaño (2016: 263) argue ‘academics do not exclusively hold the power in a research partnership. In fact, each partner has a different form of power that can be used for different times and spaces’. Researchers thus need to simultaneously recognize their privilege and the power that community members also hold; they are not mutually exclusive.

Practical challenges in design and implementation

While photo-voice was well suited to achieving our epistemological and practical goals, there were limitations and challenges. The first was sample size. In their review of photo-voice projects Coemans et al. (2019) found that a majority reported sample sizes with fewer than 10 participants. Given our interest in informing literature on water security we needed to design a project where data robustness was not contingent on a large sample. Fewer participants also made the project manageable within the semester time frame – more participants would have required more interviews, transcription time, and processing of photographs. However, we recognize that the issues identified through our photo-voice project are representative of a small section of the population willing to invest time and energy in this study. Despite limitations, the study offered in-depth qualitative data on human experience that contributes to understanding local dynamics of water insecurity, even if the findings cannot be generalized to all women in Flint.

A related consideration was participant recruitment and attrition. CBPR can be hindered when, as in our case, a community’s research fatigue combines with researchers’ new relationship in the community (Merzel and D’Aflitti, 2003). For this reason, we built on existing relationships between researchers and community members to recruit and encourage continued participation. Community researchers drew on their own networks to recruit. To maintain participant involvement, they provided accommodations and maintained communication, reminding participants of the rationale behind each data collection stage and the value of their role in it. These tasks increased community researchers’ labor but solidified their role as researchers. In turn, academic researchers consistently followed-up and accommodated participants by making extra trips to Flint when necessary. Overall, completing CBPR within the semester required an intensification of labor on all parts, which may have been less acute in a longer-term project.

The role of trusted community researchers was elemental for successful recruitment and retention. As one participant made clear during the final workshop, ‘The only reason I participated in this session, the only reason, was because the person who asked me to participate, I know them. Not ‘I’ve seen them, I’m familiar with their work’. I say, I know them’. Other participants echoed that they completed the study because they were approached by individuals they knew personally whose work they respected. Still, nearly half of the women who attended the first workshop did not continue and the reasons were not clear. By their very nature, participatory methodologies ask participants to make temporal and emotional investments; this is what scholars call the burden of participation (Wallerstein and Duran, 2006). This becomes even more burdensome within a short-term window, and patterns of attrition likely reflect different interests and availability. Also, most of the people who did not continue were Hispanic and preferred communicating in Spanish. While research materials were provided in Spanish and the lead university researchers are fluent, it is possible our outreach and retention efforts were hindered by related differences (e.g. communication styles, social networks). Given the importance of participants knowing at least one of the researchers personally, in the future we would work to establish relationships with the broader Hispanic community prior to the onset of a short-term project.

To be successful, CBPR must often reconcile the ‘different clocks’ which govern the lives of community members and researchers (Teeters and Jurow, 2018). This challenge was even more evident when working within a short-time frame. As described above, to ensure research participants had full control over the temporal commitments of the project, we jointly decided on the dates, length, and format of research activities. We thought that by scheduling project activities together, we would reduce schedule deviations. This was not the case. Community researchers coordinated between the schedules of the university team and research participants, requiring a higher time investment on the part of our busy community partners, as they had to rapidly adjust meeting times and locations to accommodate last-minute conflicts. In turn, last-minute cancelations and rescheduling by participants complicated travel logistics for the academic team and were stressful given the tight timeline. Any amendments to the research calendar meant that the course calendar had to be modified. In retrospect for any project –and specifically for short-term intense projects– it is important to build in flexibility, develop a plan for how to manage different clocks, and allocate human resources for that early on.

Closely related, our fifth limitation was the intensity of project development. Participants had many commitments and their time availability was limited. Academic researchers had to travel to Flint for any research activities. Thus, we compressed the multiple meetings recommended for photo-voice into three. While this increased the likelihood of consistent attendance and participation, it meant sacrificing the opportunity to teach participants photography skills. Participant’s confidence with photography was variable, and some pictures were unfocused or too dark to be usable. Ultimately, when conducting CBPR in a short time frame, it is important for the researchers and the community to work together to determine how best to balance the intense pace with respect for the time commitments of all involved.

A final challenge of this project was consent and confidentiality. The process of photo-voice asks participants to delve into the intimacy of their everyday lives and make them public for research purposes. The very nature of photo-voice makes protection of privacy an issue, as it is difficult to fully anonymize photos (Parylo and Hannes, 2014). During our first meeting with participants we guided them through examples of informed consent for photographs and participants were thus asked to obtain consent from whomever they photographed. When their photos came back, no faces were present in any of them. People explained that this was not necessarily a conscious choice, though some did say they were uncomfortable using the faces of their grandchildren or children. The responsibility of collecting informed consent from others may have influenced their choices and the data they obtained. However, when it came to exhibiting their pictures, all participants chose to include their names despite the option of anonymity. Participants felt that anonymity undermined the goal of claiming a grassroot narrative of their own embodied expertise.

Conclusions

The Flint water crisis was marked by a high degree of uncertainty, with a loss of trust in government officials, city infrastructure, and the social contract. In the face of this uncertainty, our partnership chose a research approach and epistemological framework which foregrounded the experience, ownership, and narrative authority of participants. This required cultivating a horizontal partnership with community researchers, ongoing discussion, and mutual decision-making with photo-voice participants who engaged in data collection, analysis, and dissemination decisions. Within our partnership, the use of photo-voice as a rapid assessment method was conducive to a research process that built trust by ensuring community-relevant results and highlighting local expertise through participant-centered narratives. Our experience supports the assertion that this method is conducive to decentering expertise and cultivating horizontal research relationships. We further argue that it was instrumental in establishing the partnerships that make it possible to bring together CBPR and rapid assessment methodologies.

Over six months, photo-voice permitted our academic-community partnership to work together to meet mutually beneficial goals. For community researchers and participants, the temporal and emotional investment put into photographs, semi-structured interviews, and data coding were steps towards the production of a grassroots narrative that they could share publicly. For academic researchers, those same activities built a data set that would inform scholarship on water insecurity. Our partnership emerged through the joint determination of goals and was maintained through an intense work rhythm, ongoing dialogue, and flexibility. While a hierarchy in decision-making remained between researchers and participants, we endeavored to maintain equitable group dynamics at each stage, which served to illustrate ethical research practices for community members and students. This short-term partnership was demanding for all involved, and it had many limitations. At various stages, the research team was aware that a longer timeline would have been preferable for trust building and a better understanding of micro-politics, among other things. From a pedagogical standpoint, conducting CBPR within a course was considerably more time-consuming than conventional teaching. However, we maintain that there is value in short-term CBPR, especially for emergent issues where there is a need for rapid, responsive methodologies.

Academic actors need not shy away from short-term partnerships with community members for community-based participatory research. We argue that short-term CBPR is facilitated when researchers make the following methodological commitments: First, the research is built around a method –like photo-voice– that ensures community-relevant results, highlights local expertise through participant-centered narratives, and foregrounds ownership of the process and the product by community members. Second, it is designed from its inception as a small-scale project, with a clear endpoint and tangible, feasible, and clearly articulated deliverables that are mutually beneficial to all parties. Third, it is based on an openly recognized complementarity of skills between academic and community researchers. Finally, all collaborators are made aware that the process will be intense and highly demanding, thus requiring a lot of time and flexibility. Of course, we would hope that short-term CBPR would transform into the seed for an enduring partnership.

We welcome readers to envision our partnership as an 800-meter sprint, rather than a long distance 25 km marathon. While the length of engagement in both races is different, both races require equal preparation on the part of the runners, and both must have a clearly established goal. Once you reach the finish line, runners are conditioned to run another race together, thus opening the possibility for longer-term partnerships. Therefore, our 800-meter sprint is also intended as a generator: one that is designed based on the construction of trust through the recognition of expertise, equitable decision-making, and product delivery, fostering the potential for a continued partnership between community and university researchers.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center – Community Core and Michigan State University’s Center for Gender in Global Context for their administrative and resource support of this project. In addition, at Michigan State University Wenda Bauchspies and Heather Howard contributed ideas for project design and implementation. This project would not have been possible without the time and energy invested by the Flint residents who agreed to participate in the multiple stages of this collaborative project. Finally, the authors thank the students in Lucero Radonic’s Gender, Justice and Environmental Change graduate seminar (Spring semester 2019) who contributed to the project through questions, ideas, and on-the-ground work.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lucero Radonic

Notes

Author biographies

Lucero Radonic is an applied anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University. Her research examines the intersections of water governance and environmental change in urban areas across the Americas.

Cara Jacob is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University.

Rowenn Kalman is an adjunct assistant profesor in the Department of Anthropology and former graduate student advisor for the Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change program at Michigan State University.

E. Yvonne Lewis is the co-director of the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center and the founding director of the National Center for African American Health Consciousness. She has a bachelors of science in clinical/community psychology from the University of Michigan – Flint.

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