A Community-Based Participatory Research Process in a Poor Swedish Neighbourhood

Health is not equally distributed and various neighbourhoods differ from each other in terms of people’s health and other social and economic variables. Numerous efforts are undertaken to develop healthier and more sustainable neighbourhoods, and a key concern in the process is citizen participation. Due to the challenge of conducting research in poor neighbourhood’s complementary research approaches with a more practice-based and democratic knowledge development are needed. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a partnership approach that aims to conduct collaborative knowledge production and to use the research findings for public health interventions. This paper sets out to describe and analyse a community-academic partnership and a CBPR process within a poor neighbourhood in Sweden. Two years of fieldwork were conducted at 26 meetings comprising 84 h in a CBPR group including a researcher, and lay and professional stakeholders. Participatory observation and detailed meeting process-notes were used when doing a qualitative thematic analysis. Eight different developmental phases was identified in the implementation of a CBPR process and four key lessons were found to be important. These were that a community-academic partnership should (1) accept different levels of participation in different phases; (2) openly discuss mutual expectations and individual prerequisites; (3) unmask power and authority; and (4) allow the work to take the time it needs. The design, process, and result of the CBPR project are relevant for local community-academic partnerships using a CBPR approach with the goal of increasing participation as a means of improving people’s health and well-being in poor neighbourhoods.