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Strangers at the Gate: Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper is about the work we do to create productive partnerships in community settings: developing relationships, demonstrating commitments, and overcoming personal and institutional barriers to community-based design research. Through an ethnographic account of the elements of community-based research normally elided from reports of design process, we explore how the impact of institutional histories and personal relationships went beyond simply identifying potential partners, but fundamentally guided the research questions and approach. We examine the different roles researchers play - researcher, confidant, advocate, interloper, invader, and collaborator - and how those roles create particular relations in the field. The contribution of this work is the development of a reflective account of the research in order to evaluate knowledge production, rigor, and advance methods for engaging in community-based research.

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  1. Strangers at the Gate: Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    February 2015
    1956 pages
    ISBN:9781450329224
    DOI:10.1145/2675133
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 28 February 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. community informatics
    2. participatory design
    3. qualitative methods
    4. reflective practice

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    • (2024)Systematic Literature Review of Disseminating Health Information to BIPOC CommunitiesHealth Open Research10.12688/healthopenres.13682.16(19)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
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