Role of Social Science in Infectious Disease Research: A Case Study of Partnering with Communities in Vector Control in a Kenyan Village

Partnering with communities is a vital component of public health research. Terms such as community participation, community engagement, and citizen participation have been used to denote community partnerships that aim to re-distribute power through negotiation between citizens and researchers and enable co-creative processes that bring non-researchers in as core partners. These citizen-researcher partnerships go beyond informed consent, voluntary participation, and intervention adherence but instead constitute a means by which shared planning, design, implementation, dissemination, and decision-making take place. In this case study, we describe our intervention study in coastal Kenya that included homeowners, schools, schoolchildren, and other stakeholders to increase people’s awareness of vectors and vector-borne diseases and catalyze their participation in vector control. The partners for this work included researchers from local and international universities, social scientists, non-governmental organizations, officials from the ministries of health and education, and the community members themselves. We trialed new strategies to deeply engage adult and child community members to promote vector control activities at home and in the community. Strengthening community involvement and establishing prolonged interaction of community representatives with control services, municipalities, and other public actors were shown to be time-consuming and costly at the beginning but rewarding during the process and with excellent potential for sustainability. In this case study, we also investigate the concepts of gender norms and patriarchy and underscore how they interact with other forms of culture to impact decision-making processes, power imbalance and dominance, and vulnerability to ill health at our study site in Kenya. We highlight social science’s contribution to enhancing a deeper understanding of the social constructs that underlie power structures and concepts of disease and health in the Kenyan village, thus fostering successful partnerships with the community and enhancing research outcomes. The key tenets from this case study are relevant to community-based research conducted in similar contexts.