Community based HIV/AIDS research : Guidelines for successful partnerships

Community Based HIV/AIDS Research: Guidelines for Successful Partnerships was created to highlight local models of community based research (CBR). The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) Community Research (CR) Core developed the Guidelines with assistance from community partners and scientists through a series of workshops to reflect on and document local models of CBR that represented some successful community based HIV/AIDS initiatives conducted in Connecticut since the start of the epidemic. The Guidelines summarize the broad themes that emerged during the course of the workshops, including various strengths and weaknesses of the collaborations in order to distinguish common features contributing to the formation, success, and continued maintenance of CBR. The Guidelines address the components needed to establish strong, practical, productive collaborations between researchers and communities in order to yield outcomes likely to meet the objectives of all parties while maintaining best practices in public health research. It also identifies potential gaps that should be addressed in future research efforts. We anticipate that research endeavors utilizing CBR techniques can and will benefit from reviewing and integrating principles from the Guidelines. Each case study describes specific strengths and weaknesses associated with conducting CBR based on their particular research collaboration. However, there were recurrent themes across all of the models. The workshop on challenging collaborations and the IDU research participant workshop added further depth to our understanding of the collaborative research process of CBR. The following are our recommended Guidelines for Successful Partnerships on Community Based HIV/AIDS Research.