Community Engagement Process: Conflicts with Community Leaders, MSRA

This assignment analyzes a case study focusing on the challenges of community engagement in public health research, specifically concerning an infectious disease researcher, Jerry, conducting a survey on HIV positive and sexually active gay men. The study highlights conflicts arising from the sensitive nature of the research, including suspicion, poor stakeholder attendance, and rejection of findings due to stigmatization concerns. The paper addresses Jerry's responsibilities to the participating community, emphasizing the importance of informed consent, consultation, and empowerment within the framework of community engagement principles. It explores the balance between understanding risky behaviors and avoiding stigmatization, suggesting strategies such as social support groups and involving influential community members. The assignment proposes an alternative study design incorporating implementation science and hybrid methodologies to improve engagement, replicability, and address stigma-related issues, concluding that effective community engagement and ethical considerations are crucial for successful public health research.

Conflicts with Community Leaders in public health research

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Introduction
Research has been adversely described as a systematic process of being
objective in gathering a multitude of information for the key purpose of analysis of relevant
aspects to inform public action. The case study has exemplified a research process involving
Jerry an infectious disease researcher. The research protocol entails a survey involving HIV
positive and sexually active partners among gay men. The study employed a survey of
various population stratus including high risks sexual behaviors, HIV status, gender,
circumcision rates, number of partners and information sharing process. For an effective
research process, engaging with the involved stakeholders is paramount.
Due to the sensitive nature of this research, Jerry encounters suspicion
concerning the information being sought. This portends serious legal issues and aspects of
nonconfidentiality. Stakeholder meetings being held are not attended by the concern persons
who are poorly attended, as the community involved does not feel involved and research
being part of them. The case study illustrates poor working relationships between the key
informers and the researcher towards cooperation in the research process. The researcher
faces stiff rejection with the dissemination of his findings meeting high criticisms and
assumptions of stigmatizing the vice. This assessment thus focuses on key responsibilities to
participating groups, measures to balance risky behaviors and stigmatization and a proposal
of alternative evaluative design and implementation guide.
Responsibilities to the participating community
Engagement in the community set up is guided by a framework of guiding
principles, strategies and key approaches. This underlying framework relies on the principles
of respecting community member’s rights in a manner that they are informed, consulted,
engaged and empowered towards making the decision process. Community engagement is

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vital and holds key tools and strategies which are geared towards ensuring success. It is vital
in enabling fostering and building trust as a key element for long term engagement and
effective governance aspects (Dunn, 2011).
Community engagements’ thus underpin a strategic process having a key
purpose of identifying working groups who are connected geographically, common interests
and have similar issues being addressed on their well being. Community engagement creates
an avenue for broadening the scope of practices and involving a collective approach
(Zfrumento et al., 2019).
Jerry needs to engage this community set up to revolve around a blend of
science and art. Science emanates from understanding the social background do f the people
or target population, cultural aspects, psychology, and revenues. Further drawing aspects of
community engagement, development, and communal psychology is relevant.
According to Bassler et al., (2008), principles of successful community
immanent revolves around increasing the knowledge base of the community on the specific
problem to tackle, encouragement of co-creation of additional knowledge and key
understanding of applicable knowledge, increasing community knowledge to identify the
problem and ensuring effective communication approaches.
As a form of realizing these essential principles, there is a need for Jerry to
entrench shared and permeated engagements towards the goal of shared responsibilities. The
community needs to be informed, consulted, involved and enabled through empowering. As
an underpinning framework of engagement, there is a need to respond to the stakeholder
needs in the community. Avenues for responding to such needs entail accepting changes a
fundamental part of growth and realizing that change must start within individual members of
the community. Secondly, the community needs to understand that growth and engagement

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start by themselves, through avenues of attitude change and self evaluation. Finally, true
partnerships are created when partnerships and power control are shared and delegated to the
community at large (Lake, 2014).
Balance of interest in risky behaviors and stigmatization
Stigma is a global problem affecting the research arena for various and diverse
reasons. Participants in communities or any settings have been stigmatized for having
diseases such as, gay HIV/AIDS, epilepsy, schizophrenia or any other undesirable behaviors
which exhibit social deviance such as lesbianism and homosexuality. It is fundamental for
research to be conducted in such settings among groups who experience stigma to develop
appropriate interventions to manage their state and stigma. Such persons who might
experience stigma have been demonstrated to be hard to recruit and can portend a high-risk
state for harms which could increase the rates of marginalization and negative effects thus
affecting the social state such as in the case study (Chambers et al., 2015).
Stigma is linked with the state of social construction phenomenon which
occurs when members of a group experience discrimination on a factor of shared
characteristics that are deemed undesirable and persistent in the group. These effects can
range from internalized self-stigma to overt discrimination by others. Research and ethics
point of view have acknowledged the cognizance of ethical challenges that arise from stigma
(Bouris et al., 2010).
Studies have demonstrated that infection of HIV among populations often
experience stigmatization. Among this category entail those with risky behaviors underlying
sexuality-related actions. Jerry needs to ensure that the rights and privacy of these key
populous are protected and confidential protection enhanced. Initiating social support groups
where the participants could be engaged is a formal way of creating support for these

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categories. Enhancing the support network is essential for increasing higher self-esteem,
improving positive group identity and improving mental health state (Smit et al., 2010).
Further, involving key personnel and influential persons in the group of
interests are key to building a positive consensus among the participants. There is a need for
overall wider acknowledgment of the problem and involving other persons of interests in the
community towards positive
Alternative design and implementation of the study
Interventions aiming at alleviating and demonstrating the effectiveness of
stigma related status have been highlighted. Employing implementation science seeks to
improve the key population health state through leverage on interdisciplinary methods that
seek to promote and disseminate effective interventions. Adoption of these strategies aims at
utilizing methods that are acceptable, appropriate, fidelity and easily penetrable to the
population (Proctor et al., 2011).
Incorporating hybrid design in this study is essential. Hybrid design aim at
testing the effects of examining the implementation process and testing the implementation
interventions compared to clinical measures outputs, (Curran et al., 2012). Implementation
science adoption in this research is vital as it brings the relevant policymakers, participants
and other key stakeholders into the research process thus improving engagement aspects. To
enhance the replicability and rigor in this stigma oriented arena, there is need for evaluation
of previous works undertaken and reviewing to suit this population. There is a need to
combine a framework in the design aspects towards structural level and individualized based
risks and resilience as avenues that hold self-stigma among these populations (Pantelic et al.,
2019).

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Conclusion
It is evident that stigma and the overall fear of being judged drive and hampers
negative research progress towards understanding these vulnerable population settings.
Stigma has been regarded as a public health problem threat affecting the overall
epidemiological study of health-related conditions. The researcher in this case scenario faces
an uphill task towards balancing the overall responsibilities of community participation,
understanding risky behaviors and stigmatization process towards surveying the gay
community. There is a need for adoption of implementations science which seeks leverage of
key stakeholders’ towards promoting acceptance and participation in the overall community
set up.

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References
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