Involving Community Members on Project Teams Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) shares how he has developed programs to train community members as research staff.

We also have a variety of other elements of tribal control over the process that include things like development of tribal research codes. More and more tribes have these, but in the process of conducting research, it's helpful if a set of guidelines can be set out so that both the researchers and the tribe understand what the expectations are. Who has the ability to grant permission to use the data, to publish data? Is there some tribal review process to examine manuscripts before they go out for publication? Those kinds of things. Those kinds of elements of tribal control are really critical.

Second mechanism has to do with involving community members as key members of the project team. What we did in our approaches is to develop programs to train community members as research staff. That can be informal, but in our projects what we've tried to do is actually create research courses that we can get the local university to grant community credit hours to the tribal members for participating in this.

That has the advantage of increasing the education/higher ed access for tribal members, and at the same time, creating expertise among tribal members so that there is infrastructure development along with the project. As a result when you leave, there is more potential for the projects to be sustained and to continue.

I think the idea of training tribal members as research staff goes hand-in-hand with the participatory approaches. I think traditionally researchers have said that we need to be removed from our subjects of study. We need to be more objective, and if we involve more community members, they'll be biased. We see that as strictly a training issue and that it's important for people to be informed about that and to recognize what their role is, and so that's one of the elements of the training that we have provided. That's the second mechanism.

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