A: The bottom line is that one of the reasons for doing research is to benefit those people who are participating. Generating knowledge for knowledge's sake is not necessarily something that has immediate or even long-term benefits to the participants. As with anything, if people aren't benefiting, they will make less willing participants. Also, if we're studying and hoping to change people's routines, then we need to be able to see how things can go wrong and where we can make things better. We're not assuming everything is wonderful out there. Clearly, the people who are potentially using the services and the entities that fund the services are all going to have to feel that they get some benefit from your recommendations. Understanding their perspectives and how to include them in developing the research is really important.

A: In terms of thinking about how you want to frame your research and how to be a successful researcher, you may want to think about questions that can be more easily answered in communities to which you have access or with whom you're already working because you may have good contacts there. You may want to think about questions that are important to some of the people in those communities. Researching an area that's already important to a community may help you gain additional resources and support, or you may find valuable collaborators who are more willing to collaborate with you because you're dealing with a question that they also find important.

I'm assuming that you're working in areas in which you want to impact outcomes of the children or the families with whom you're working. There's a lot of evidence to show that simply publishing articles does not result in enormous public policy change or changes in practices. We've learned over the last twenty years that involving consumers and family members of consumers when we're trying to advocate for better services or for continued resources is key to making things happen. In terms of changing public policy, many of your programs and your research areas are really focusing on trying to change individual practices or professional practices, and unless you can effectively mobilize communities, it's going to be very difficult for you to go from publishing to the next step, such as how well people are implementing your program.

A: One of the reasons why people sometimes don't like researchers and academics is that there are enormous inequalities. Researchers often earn a lot more than many of the people who are living in the communities of interest, which can create a general distrust because income and power tend to be related. Working together with these communities can help to minimize some of the social inequalities because when you're sitting around the table and talking about issues, people get to see each other as individuals. Researchers can also gain insights in terms of what kind of things need to get measured and how to measure them directly from the communities, and the people in the communities can see that their voices are valued.

A: Good community collaborations can increase the relevance of your assessments and your outcomes. Communities can help in just trying to word items on questionnaires, because people understand questions very differently. Even questions as simple as "Who lives in your household?" may mean very different things to people in different communities, and may mean very different things to an 8-year-old versus a 15-year-old.

Community collaborators can also bring expertise in fundraising and gaining community support. Part of the reason for doing this is because there really isn't any value-free science. We all bring our assumptions and values to the picture, and a lot of different perspectives come into play when trying to create change. The more that you can involve them in formulating your research, the better off you're going to be in terms of implementation and dissemination.