Researching health together : engaging patients and stakeholders from topic identification to policy change

The challenges of addressing health disparities, the ethical imperative to include stakeholders in research, and the slow translation of research evidence into practice are all driving a movement towards more community-based and participatory approaches to research.

Researching Health Together brings together authors who have produced innovative methods or implemented projects focused on different stages of the research process, from question development to evaluation and translation.

Editor Emily B. Zimmerman gathers exemplary new methods and projects into one place for the benefit of students designing research projects and proposals, those learning stakeholder-engaged methods, and those involved in implementing and funding stakeholder-engaged projects.

Each chapter addresses: how engagement was conceptualized, organized, and implemented; how engagement was evaluated; impacts on processes and outcomes of the project; and facilitators, barriers, and lessons learned.

The book serves as a core textbook for courses in community-based health research at the graduate level. "[This book] focuses only on translational health research and expands beyond CBPR to include practice-based research networks (PBRN) and stakeholder-engaged research within health systems....

The overall strengths of this book are its in-depth and almost inspirational focus on CBPR methodology, be those actual geographic or cultural communities or disease-based communities....

Researching Health Together, in its first edition, is a necessary bridge from the theory of participatory health research to its application across research environments." - Journal of Participatory Research Methods