PSU think tank on research

When PSU chemistry professor Tami Lasseter Clare was tasked with uncovering the secrets behind a 2000-year-old Chinese sculpture, she did so from a chemist’s perspective: mineral, carbon and corrosion are part of her vocabulary. However, understanding the significance behind what she uncovered required collaboration with an art historian from the city’s museum.

Similarly, when sociologist Margaret Everett and her partner, Meg Merrick, wanted to evaluate the eating habits of Latino children in Portland, it was the parents of those schoolchildren who helped them collect the data. 

Although they are from two different disciplines, their projects are similar in that they demonstrate a trend in scientific research that engages community members and entities into the work. It used to be the case that when it came to scientific research, there was little, if any room for the community to play a part in the project. From developing a hypothesis, collecting information and creating solutions, highly educated researchers often carried out the work.

In recent years, however, researchers have realized the importance that community members can play in research. Instead of just observing an environment and those in it from a distance, researchers are now bringing the community into the process to help them collect information, develop meaningful questions and come up with solutions that would benefit both of them.

In an effort to better understand the impact of engaging the community into scientific research, Portland State’s Center for Academic Excellence has gathered a group of faculty from diverse disciplines to develop case studies about their community-engaged research projects. In other words, it’s research about community-engaged research.

Katie Shaw, graduate assistant at the CAE, said the project is recognition of the fact that the university is not a separate entity but part of the real world. As a result, it has the power to solve real world problems.

“The purpose of this initiative is for PSU researchers, who do community-engaged research, to stop doing the work that they normally do and reflect on why is it important and what some of the key issues are that come up when they engage the community,” said Kevin Kecskes, who head the CAE.

Kecskes said the group is made up of diverse faculty from different disciplines, ranging from computer science to sociology, psychology, biology and chemistry. Their similarity lies in their individual work that incorporates the community in several ways.

For example, one of the researchers is computer science professor Warren Harrison, who works with the Clackamas County Sheriff’s office to develop better computer systems to aid law enforcement officers on duty.

In another project, psychology professor Kerth O’Brien, who talked to 142 community members from African and Latino communities, examined the experiences with doctors of patients from different cultural backgrounds.

Some researchers engage communities from other countries into their research as well. Biology professor Lisa Weasel studied food security issues in India and studied the different local food distribution systems in the country. Her findings were published in her 2009 book Food Fray: Inside the Controversy over Genetically Modified Food.

Shaw said such community-engaged research conducted in the partnership between community and the university bridges the two.

“It opens up an understanding that the academic profession comes from a position of privileges,” Shaw said. “All the more reason to partner with community and identify the need to communally develop.”

“It allows researchers to see that they belong to their community,” she said.

Kecskes said the chances of having a real impact greatly increase when scientists receive more input.

“The faculty in general really appreciate the community,” Kecskes said. “They understand that they are extremely smart but still only one person, so if they work with other people, they will have better research questions and better disseminations of information.”

Clare said working with the Portland Art Museum helps her disseminate the results to a wider audience through the museum’s exhibition, compared to the limited audience of science journal. She hopes this will help encourage more students to take up science as their study.

O’Brien said researchers sometimes can learn from community members in working with them.

“I start out with a good sense of what I bring as a scholar,” O’Brien said. “On the flip side, I also need to be ready to learn from community member collaborators—essentially to be trained by them.”

Community-engaged research also comes with its own unique sets of challenges.

Public administration professor Masami Nishishiba said that for her research in evaluating the effectiveness of the four-day workweek in Clackamas County, she has to put time into building relationships in addition to doing the actual research.

“The government sometimes thinks of me as a contractor and tells me what to do, how I should run my research,” Nishishiba said. “You lose some control and spend a lot of time on building relationships.”

Because it involves many community entities, time is a concern for many faculty members.

“To include community members fully requires [that] we need to be open to changes along the way,” O’Brien said. “That openness means a project almost always takes longer than planned.”

Part of the difficulty lies in knowing how to properly coordinate between the various community members and organizations involved in the project. Everett said researchers have to respect the community process and the time frame of each entity and understand that the researchers are not leading the project or doing it on their own.

“There are some problems in regards to who should I contact with results, whether it’s the collection’s care manager or the museum’s conservator,” Clare said of her work with the Portland Art Museum.

According to Kecskes, the CAE projects have several objectives. One is to help more students and faculty at PSU to recognize the number of world-class research projects being conducted everyday at the university. Second is to let the Portland the world communities know of PSU as a research university that has the capability of developing this kind of research.

It also keeps in touch with PSU’s motto and the university’s position as an urban campus.

Kecskes also said that he hopes that the project’s findings will help serve as a model for other researchers who are interested in doing community-based research.

The overall project is lead by Kecskes and Amy Driscoll, a senior scholar at the CAE and a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. The group’s finding will be synthesized into an upcoming book to be edited by Kecskes and Driscoll.