Review Maps Community Engagement Frameworks to Research Challenges

A new narrative review published in BMC Global and Public Health examines the complex challenges inherent in conducting research within community settings and proposes how multifaceted community engagement strategies can address them. The study, led by Tanvir C. Turin and colleagues, utilizes a framework-mapping approach to explore the relevance and contribution of various engagement models to Community-Based Research (CBR). The review argues that traditional research paradigms have often treated communities as passive sources of data, resulting in extractive practices that overlook local priorities and knowledge systems. By contrast, CBR emphasizes equitable co-ownership of research processes, shared decision-making, and the active participation of community members throughout the entire research lifecycle. The authors contend that addressing the distinct challenges of CBR requires flexible, relational approaches rooted in genuine power-sharing and supported by institutional commitment to long-term collaboration.

The review identifies that challenges in community-based research are not static; they shift in nature and intensity across different stages of the research lifecycle and vary according to community, cultural, and contextual factors. The authors categorize these challenges into several key dimensions, including ethical and equitable partnerships, collaboratively defining research priorities, co-designing methods, fostering community capacity, ensuring sustainability of partnerships, and meaningfully assessing outcomes over time. The central finding of the review is that no single framework fully encompasses the breadth of challenges encountered in CBR. Instead, the value lies in integrating complementary engagement approaches to ensure research is methodologically sound, socially responsive, culturally attuned, and co-owned by communities. This integration enables research to move beyond knowledge extraction toward a collaborative and transformative endeavor conducted with, by, and for communities.

One of the primary challenges identified is the establishment of equitable and ethical partnerships with communities. Building trust is described as one of the most vital hurdles, as researchers often enter communities with limited knowledge of local histories, cultural norms, and social dynamics. This unfamiliarity can lead to skepticism or outright resistance, particularly in communities that have been harmed or misrepresented by researchers in the past. The review highlights that without a foundation of mutual trust, collaboration becomes difficult, preventing meaningful research. Furthermore, unbalanced power dynamics persist despite the core CBR principle of equitable collaboration. Researchers typically manage resources, timelines, and the general research process, which often places power dynamics in favor of the research team. Achieving a balanced power dynamic requires shared leadership and genuinely participatory decision-making, involving everyone from setting goals to designing the research process and deciding knowledge translation strategies.

Historical and political contexts also significantly shape community engagement. The review notes that many communities engaged in CBR are marginalized or racialized, carrying legacies of historical trauma, colonization, and political marginalization. Concrete examples cited include the legacies of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the U.S. Public Health Service sexually transmitted disease experiments conducted in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948. These histories, along with more recent issues such as the enrollment of undocumented immigrants in for-profit drug trials under inadequate consent, shape how these communities perceive and engage with research. Failing to acknowledge these contexts can lead to disengagement, distrust, and resistance. Additionally, ethical complexity extends beyond obtaining approval from a research ethics board; it requires genuine community consent, continuous dialogue, collective decision-making, and transparency about risks, benefits, and data use. Researchers must practice ongoing, context-sensitive ethics that uphold community autonomy and reflect shared values.

The review also addresses challenges in co-defining priorities and co-designing research. CBR is reflexive and adaptive, emphasizing flexibility to meet community needs, which often conflicts with rigid research structures, timelines, and institutional constraints. Adaptive research design enables ongoing revision and responsiveness, allowing the process to evolve organically in collaboration with community feedback. However, this flexibility can create tensions with traditional academic expectations. Communication barriers and accessibility present another significant challenge. Many communities, such as immigrant populations, speak languages other than English, and academic research often uses formal jargon that adds to these barriers. When communication tools do not meet the community’s linguistic and literacy levels, engagement becomes uneven. Furthermore, researchers often underestimate the extent to which academic language is foreign to community members, potentially deterring individuals from engaging due to perceived patronizing discourse. The challenge lies not in the community’s inability to understand research but in the researchers’ lack of effective communication tailored to the cultural context.

Building and supporting community capability presents its own set of obstacles. Many communities face limited resources, lacking technical skills, research experience, or access to tools and infrastructure. Capacity building is a core principle of CBR, but it requires time and funding for training, mentoring, and ongoing support. Without it, participation risks becoming symbolic rather than substantive. The review highlights an often-implicit oversight: the lack of fair compensation and recognition for community members’ time, knowledge, and engagement. While research teams may be funded by grants or institutions, community members often contribute with inadequate financial support or acknowledgment, reflecting extractive dynamics. Additionally, many researchers enter community-based work without adequate training in community engagement, cultural competency, or participatory research methods. Traditional academic training often neglects the interpersonal, cultural, and political competencies required for successful community partnership, leading to unrealistic expectations and a failure to anticipate the natural conflicts of authentic collaboration.

Sustainability and impact pose further challenges, as the majority of CBR projects are limited by finite funding cycles. When projects end abruptly, communities may become disillusioned or feel abandoned, eroding trust and diminishing the value of engagement. Research fatigue is another underrecognized challenge, occurring when community members feel exhausted by repeated requests to participate without seeing tangible results. This phenomenon is exacerbated by researchers’ tendency to approach communities independently without regard for previous research experiences. Non-optimal strategies for community dissemination and knowledge translation also hinder impact. Academic publishing models create barriers through paywalls and technical language, and less than half of community-based participatory researchers report disseminating findings outside of academic publications. Equitable dissemination requires a commitment to open access, plain language summaries, and community-led knowledge translation strategies that prioritize usability and local relevance.

To address these challenges, the review maps seven key conceptual frameworks to specific areas of CBR. Community-engaged Scholarship through the Four Rs framework (Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, and Responsibility) provides an ethical foundation for addressing historical and cultural challenges, rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems. Normalization Process Theory (NPT) focuses on the practical processes of embedding research practices within community contexts, helping to explain how CBR practices become accepted and routinely embedded. Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation offers diagnostic and prescriptive tools for addressing power imbalances, highlighting the risks of tokenistic engagement and offering a vision for more equitable partnerships. Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) shifts focus from community deficits to strengths, providing a framework for addressing capacity and resource constraints by empowering communities to lead data collection and analysis.

Infinite Game Theory reconceptualizes community engagement not as a finite project but as a continuous, evolving process, addressing challenges related to sustainability and ownership. This framing allows for flexibility and iteration across the entire program of research, prioritizing relationships over immediate outcomes. Diffusion of Innovation theory helps expand equitable engagement by explaining the continuum of participation and adapting strategies to shift this continuum toward greater involvement through peer-to-peer communication. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Spectrum of Public Participation offers a structured framework for defining appropriate levels of community involvement, ranging from informing to empowering. Unlike Arnstein’s Ladder, which is diagnostic, the IAP2 Spectrum is operational, providing a menu of engagement levels suitable for different decisions and contexts. Together, these frameworks offer complementary perspectives that can inform the selection and implementation of contextually appropriate strategies.

The review emphasizes that these frameworks play out within institutional contexts that can either enable or undermine CBR. Traditional academic reward structures often misalign with community-based research practices, creating barriers for researchers, particularly early-career academics who may face disadvantages in conventional evaluation processes. Academic institutions remain organized around disciplinary silos with rigid boundaries that impede the interdisciplinary collaboration essential for addressing complex community challenges. Research funding structures frequently inadequately support the relationship-building required for authentic community partnership, with grant timelines conflicting with community rhythms. Universities often lack administrative structures to support community partnerships, leaving individual researchers to navigate complex collaborations without institutional backing. These structural, systemic, and institutional barriers exacerbate the challenges identified throughout the CBR process and influence the application of engagement-oriented frameworks.

The authors conclude that CBR represents a fundamental paradigm shift away from extractive academic inquiry toward collaborative knowledge production grounded in partnership, equity, and social justice. Realizing this transformative potential requires clear recognition of its inherent complexities, including the profound relational and ethical challenges of building authentic trust and navigating historical contexts. The framework mapping presented in the review provides the core analytical contribution, demonstrating how different engagement-oriented conceptual frameworks variably address these challenges across stages of the community-based research process. By integrating robust theoretical frameworks with committed institutional reform, researchers and communities can co-create knowledge that is truly of, by, and for the populations it endeavors to serve. This approach advances a more just and equitable research enterprise, ensuring that research is not only methodologically sound but also socially responsive and culturally attuned. The review underscores that addressing these challenges requires flexible, relational approaches rooted in genuine power-sharing, supported by institutional commitment to long-term collaboration.

The study highlights the importance of embedding comprehensive, context-specific engagement strategies into CBR to ensure research is co-owned by communities. The authors note that while community engagement and participatory approaches extend beyond CBR, this review specifically focuses on their application to the distinctive challenges encountered in community-based research. The literature on CBR and community engagement is substantial, with prior syntheses cataloguing partnership principles and strategies. This narrative review contributes a distinct, practice-grounded synthesis that draws these threads together, tracing how recurrent challenges arise and evolve across the full research lifecycle. By pairing each challenge with established engagement frameworks, the review offers a comprehensive understanding of the complexities involved in conducting effective and ethical community-based research. The findings suggest that moving beyond knowledge extraction requires a collaborative and transformative endeavor, one that respects the lived experience and expertise of community members at every stage of the research process.

The review also addresses the emotional dimensions of community-based research, which generate significant labor for researchers and community members. This includes managing tensions between institutional requirements and community needs, navigating interpersonal relationships across power differentials, and supporting communities through potentially retraumatizing research topics. This underrecognized challenge involves building trust, facilitating difficult conversations, and managing ethical complexities that rarely receive adequate attention in research planning or resource allocation. Institutions and funders need to formally recognize emotional labor as a critical component of community-engaged research, allocating resources for training, support services, and developing guidelines around ethical emotional labor. Viewed collectively, the conceptual frameworks synthesized in the review reinforce that meaningful community engagement depends not only on the actions of researchers and communities but also on institutional policies, governance structures, funding mechanisms, and academic cultures that enable equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable partnerships.

In summary, the review provides a detailed examination of the challenges in conducting research in community settings and the strategies to address them. It emphasizes that CBR is not merely a methodological choice but an ethical imperative aimed at promoting equity and social justice. The challenges it entails are central to dismantling extractive research legacies and fostering authentic partnerships grounded in mutual respect. The framework mapping offers a structured visual summary of how each framework offers complementary conceptual perspectives on the CBR challenges. The mapping should be interpreted as an integrative synthesis that illustrates overlap and convergence across frameworks, rather than as exclusive or prescriptive. By understanding these challenges and applying the appropriate frameworks, researchers can better navigate the complex terrain of community engagement. This approach fosters equitable power-sharing, culturally responsive practices, and mutual accountability, overcoming both immediate relational barriers and entrenched systemic obstacles within academic and funding institutions. The ultimate goal is to advance a research enterprise that is truly collaborative, transformative, and beneficial to the communities it serves.

Subject of Research: Challenges in conducting research in community settings and community engagement strategies in response

Article Title: Challenges in conducting research in community settings and community engagement strategies in response

Article References: Turin, T. C., Chowdhury, N., Raihan, M. M. H., Masiclat, R., Rahman, N., & Rumana, N. (2026). Challenges in conducting research in community settings and community engagement strategies in response. BMC Global and Public Health, 4(1), Article 65. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44263-026-00298-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44263-026-00298-3

Keywords: Challenges, conducting, research, community, settings, engagement, strategies, response, scientific research