The report titled “Community-Based Participatory Research: A Strategy for Building Healthy Communities and Promoting Health through Policy Change” has the objective of providing strategies for incorporating cultural awareness and practices into the modern policymaking process. In particular, it addresses how modern research is dominated by cloistered academic communities, which are, predominantly, white male-centric, thus creating a disparity in how knowledge is generated and distributed (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003). Likewise, the populace is rarely given any chances to create knowledge or lead research on their own, often reduced to passive recipients of knowledge or test subjects in a research.
The report makes an attempt to incorporate concepts of cultural humility into the policy-creation processes. The instruments it offers purposefully focus on the disadvantaged and underrepresented members of the American society, including immigrants, women, transgender individuals, minorities, and other interested parties (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003). Therefore, it tries to diversify the viewpoints present in research and create a knowledge that is not centered in any one particular culture. Having different cultural values acknowledged and represented is critical to demonstrating cultural humility in a multinational country, such as the US (Fisher, 2020). Nevertheless, there are several issues with the approach that, in my opinion, deserve criticism. The premise of the report acknowledges the secluded nature of modern research and provides instruments to empower people to do their own studying. However, it does not address the reasons why research traveled in this direction. In addition, the article itself is very US-centric, and does not relate well to situations in other countries, thus limiting the scope of implementation of tools offered (Hughes et al., 2020). Overall, however, I think this report is very useful for facilitating culture-sensitive people-led research efforts in this particular country.
References
Fisher, E. S. (2020). Cultural humility as a form of social justice: Promising practices for global school psychology training. School Psychology International, 41(1), 53-66.
Hughes, V., Delva, S., Nkimbeng, M., Spaulding, E., Turkson-Ocran, R. A., Cudjoe, J.,… & Han, H. R. (2020). Not missing the opportunity: Strategies to promote cultural humility among future nursing faculty. Journal of Professional Nursing, 36(1), 28-33
Minkler, M., & Wallerstein, N (eds.). (2003). Community-based participatory research for health. Jossey-Bass.