Engaged Research: Strengthening Research Teams Through Community Researchers

Engaged researchEngaged research, which strengthens research teams through community researchersCommunity researchers, offers many opportunities and challenges. From better access to community members who are hard to reach, to the collection of more meaningful and authenticAuthentic data, and greater trustworthiness of research findings, the benefitsBenefits for research are manifold. However, research has also shown that community researchersCommunity researchers might be overtly biased, only collect superficial data or lack the confidenceConfidence to probe deeply enough, among other challenges. Simultaneously, the literature on community researchersCommunity researchers is heavily biased towards high-income countries, and there is very little to be found on experiences from low-and middle-income countries that goes beyond assistance in obtaining informed consentInformed consent. This chapter starts to close that gap by presenting a case study involving 12 community researchersCommunity researchers from the South African San community. Collecting no personal dataPersonal data and obtaining all research input through community researchersCommunity researchers shows that research led by vulnerable groups for vulnerable groups is possible. It is one way of ensuring that the San, and wider research communities, have access to research they can trustTrust.