A Community Engagement and Validation Process: A Tutorial for Relational and Contextual Data Collection Methods

Community-based research is most effective when the voices of residents are involved not only in the data collection phase, but the subsequent processes used to validate and synthesize findings. This tutorial describes our community-engaged approach to building trust, generating data, and validating research findings within a short time frame. We used three methods for community engagement: kitchen table methodology, neighborhood walks, and community validation. These methods were bookended by an initial project kickoff and a final presentation. Although these methods are already established in the literature, our tutorial is unique in that it describes how we combined these methods to holistically generate data and validate participants’ experiences.