Building effective community-academic partnerships to improve health: A qualitative study of perspectives from communities

Purpose. To identify, through a qualitative study, community perspectives o n the critical factors that facilitate the development, effectiveness, and sustainability of community-academic partnerships. Method. Between June 1998 and April 1999, 25 semistructured interviews were conducted with community members who represented eight partnerships at fiv e academic health centers. Content analysis and open coding were performed on the data, and patterns of ideas and concepts were categorized. Results. After review of the data, responses from three partnerships were e xcluded. Nine major themes that community respondents thought strongly infl uenced the effectiveness of community-academic partnerships emerged from re spondents from the remaining five partnerships: (1) creation and nurturing of trust; (2) respect for a community's knowledge; (3) community-defined an d prioritized needs and goals; (4) mutual division of roles and responsibil ities; (5) continuous flexibility, compromise, and feedback; (6) strengthen ing of community capacity; (7) joint and equitable allocation of resources; (8) sustainability and community ownership; and (9) insufficient funding p eriods. Conclusion. The themes that emerged from this study of the perceptions and experiences of the community partners in community-academic partnerships ca n be critical to further developing and evolving these partnerships.