Working with Communities
Harm is the last thing we want to do when working with community partners, particularly those serving vulnerable or marginalized communities. The following concepts, methodologies, and resources can support you in designing and implementing learning and research that helps rather than hurts.
Research Compliance
You may need to seek approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) depending on what kind of research project you are doing. If students will be participating in the research, they need to be added to your request. The UO’s Research Compliance Services office includes many useful resources, including a tool to determine if your project requires IRB approval and draft partnership agreement language that had been approved by UO and can be adapted for UO projects. They are also happy to assist with questions and support for making sure that research is approved and ethical. Receiving IRB approval usually takes a fair amount of time and so is another area to plan well ahead when building your partnerships and projects.
Consent
Informed consent is de rigeur practice for human subjects research and requires that any study participants, even those engaging with students, are fully informed about the project and only then agree to participate. The UO’s Human Subjects Research page includes institutional guidance on informed consent, including a template consent form. This form is itself a useful tool for thinking through the goals, values, and protections of your project.
Informed consent is a concept you should consider bringing to your relationship with community partners and students as well. Taking it a step further, you may wish to consider a more in-depth consent process wherein consent is not a one-time action but an ongoing and vital conversation with established check-in mechanisms. This concept, sometimes called “radical consent,” accounts for the dynamic nature of collaborative work and supports everyone involved in a project to feel comfortable and respected at every stage. The Research Compliance Services team can support you here with guidance on anonymizing strategies, if relevant, including getting verbal consent, not having participants sign forms, using pseudonyms to protect the vulnerable, etc.
Trauma-Informed
While the concept of “trauma-informed” engagement can feel capacious, at its root it simply means assuming a strong likelihood that many of the humans you engage with will be living with the repercussions of trauma and consciously interacting in ways that do not inflame those traumas. Citing Hopper, et al, Carmela J. DeCandia and Kathleen Guarino (2015) write, “Core principles of trauma-informed care across models include trauma knowledge, safety, choice, empowerment, and cultural competence” (14). Different fields have their own approaches to trauma-informed care, work, and research. This section highlights a few key areas.
First, if working with vulnerable populations it is quite likely that you will encounter people who have experienced trauma. Design your project with a goal of not re-traumatizing the people you are working with, including in drafting the questions you may ask interview subjects. Carefully crafting questions and approaches is particularly important if students will be engaging through interviews or other means so that they do not find themselves in a position of having triggered someone’s trauma and not knowing how to respond. Work closely with your project partners or others from the communities you are working in to craft your questions and approaches to meet the trauma-informed goal.
Keep in mind, too, that students may also have experienced trauma and consider how to support them in engaging in the work in a way that does not trigger their own traumas. And students should be prepared to work with people who may have experienced trauma. The notions of “brave space” rather than “safe space,” and clarifying that uncomfortable does not inherently mean unsafe (e.g., we may feel uncomfortable at times, which is important for growth, but that discomfort is not the same as being unsafe), may be useful in supporting students to dive into their work with compassion for themselves and others.
A practice of radical informed consent also supports trauma-informed work by empowering those who may have been de-powered through sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse, combat experiences, structural inequities, and more. “A Trauma-Informed Approach to Sexual Violence Research Ethics and Open Science” by Rebecca Campbell, Rachael Goodman-Williams, and McKenzie Javorka (2019) provides an important perspective on both the practice of trauma-informed research ethics (focused specifically on working with survivors of sexual violence but with broad implications), as well as considerations for open science and data sharing with vulnerable and/or traumatized populations.
Attribution and Citation
It goes without saying that your work with community partners should include attribution and citation for all sources. But that can be a challenging task when working with community members in ways that are not easy to document or catalogue or if communities have a need to protect anonymity. This can be particularly challenging if students are doing some or all of the research, as they will need guidance on best practices for recording and documenting sources. The UO librarians are a good resource of support on this topic, both as consultants for faculty and as educators for students and classes.