Laying the Groundwork for Participatory Research With a Rohingya Refugee Community

Public Significance Statement Research involving collaboration between academics and community members can have positive benefits, including for newly arrived refugee communities. This article suggests that it is important to focus on relationship building, capacity building, and information gathering, especially in the early development of a community-academic partnership. Laying the groundwork in preparation for community-based participatory research (CBPR) is critical, particularly for academic-community partnerships with refugees and immigrants who have not yet engaged in CBPR. Objective: In this article, we describe the process of developing and nurturing a CBPR partnership between university researchers and a newly arrived Rohingya refugee community, providing background on the community and our collaborative efforts to date. Method: Co-occurring, interdependent, and iterative processes related to relationship building, capacity building, and research and informal data gathering helped to develop and promote the partnership. Results: Case study examples illustrate challenges and possible resolutions. Conclusions: Particularly for newly arrived refugee and immigrant communities, historical disenfranchisement and current stressors can impact how CBPR partnerships are developed and nurtured, thus, ongoing considerations of chronosystemic factors, attending to community-specific priorities while also connecting with other communities, and embracing multiple roles of academic researcher, advocate, and ally, can facilitate CBPR partnership development and future research projects.