Written assignmentCommunity health assessment

How CBPR differs from traditional forms of community

The brief defines the two approaches by who makes the key decisions. That is the distinction to hold, because involving a community and letting it decide are very different things.

Editorial process

Last reviewed · August 25, 2026

Written by

Maren Caldwell

MSN, RN, CNE

Medical-surgical nursing, pharmacology and NCLEX preparation

Reviewed by

Dr. Tessa Redmond

DNP, RN, CNE

Evidence-based practice and clinical education

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Final review

Participation is not the same as decision authority

The brief is careful about the distinction and it is worth taking as the spine of the answer: the two approaches differ in who takes the lead when making decisions. That means the test of whether a project is genuinely community-based participatory research is not whether community members were consulted, surveyed, or sat on an advisory board. It is whether they held authority over decisions that mattered: what question the research asks, how data are collected and by whom, who has access to the results, and what happens to the findings afterwards. A great deal of research described as participatory involves community members while retaining every decision inside the institution, and naming that gap is what distinguishes a strong answer from a definitional one. The gap between involvement and authority is where most of the interesting cases sit, and naming it is what turns a definition into an argument the reader can test against examples they already know.

Follow the consequences, because they run in both directions and an honest treatment says so. Shared authority tends to produce research questions the community actually cares about, better recruitment and retention because the people asking are trusted, findings that are more likely to be acted on locally, and a defensible answer to the extractive-research problem that produced mistrust in the first place. It also costs: the timeline lengthens because relationships take time, the design may be less controlled than a researcher would choose, the community may prioritise a question with less academic value, and there are real difficulties about who speaks for a community and who is left out of that claim. Note too that the brief's own definition makes community flexible, so it can mean a neighbourhood, a hospital's workforce or a school's students, and the who-decides question is exactly as sharp inside an organisation as it is in a neighbourhood.

Likely learning objectives

Define CBPR by decision authority rather than by participation.
Test a described project against that criterion.
State the benefits and the costs of shared authority.
Recognise the problem of who speaks for a community.

Assignment instructions

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Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.

Community-Based Participatory Research is often used as part of a particular form of health research called Community Health Assessment (CHA). CHA is research into the health-related conditions of a “community.” The community may be a neighborhood or city, or even a state or country, but it may also be a community of health workers in a hospital or a community of students in a school. The term community is very flexible! A CHA may be undertaken by a health department or a hospital to fulfill a legislative mandate, by a university or funding agency to understand a selected issue better, or by the community itself in response to an emerging health-related problem. There are basically two different approaches to community health assessment: the “health planning approach” and the “community development approach.” These two approaches differ in who takes the lead when making decisions. The traditional health planning approach is considered more “top down,” in that professional experts make the key decisions. The community-development approach—of which CBPR is one—takes a more “bottom up” approach, in which community stakeholders make the key decisions regarding the research and development of health programs that will affect them directly. For this week’s Assignment, you will start thinking about your Final Project—the design of a Community Health Assessment using CBPR. For this preparatory step towards your Final Project, consider how CBPR is a bottom-up “community organizing” approach to community health research and how it differs from the traditional top-down “health planning” form of health research. To prepare: Review Bracht (1999), “Assessing Community Needs, Resources, and Readiness.” Review Minkler and Wallerstein (2008), “Critical Issues in Developing and Following CBPR Principles.” Submit a 3-page account of how CBPR differs from traditional forms of community health research. Include: Five elements of CBPR that differ from traditional approaches to health research in communities and an explanation of how they differ. At least one example of how these five elements of CBPR can be applied. https://archive.org/stream/communitybasedpa00mink#…

Course-wide instructions that accompany this question

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

What this assignment requires

01An account of how community-based participatory research differs from traditional forms of community health research.
02Engagement with the health planning and community development approaches to community health assessment.
03An explanation of who makes key decisions under each approach.
04Application to the community health assessment work the course requires.