Building Institutional Capacity for Engaged Research: Proceedings of a Workshop (2025)
Chapter: 7 Aligning Core Values and Measurements
7
Aligning Core Values and Measurements
Building institutional capacity for engaged research requires moving beyond traditional metrics focused on inputs and outputs—such as funding, students, patents, papers, and publications—to focus on outcomes that truly matter to people and communities. “How do we move from valuing what we measure to measuring what we value?” asked Mahmud Farooque, planning committee member and associate director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. Ideas for addressing this challenge were the focus of a presentation, interactive activities, and discussions.
ENGAGING COMMUNITIES AND CO-DEVELOPING A MEASURE OF TRUST AND TRUSTWORTHINESS
Nadine Barrett, professor of social sciences and health policy and senior associate dean of community engagement and equity in research at Atrium Health Wake Forest School of Medicine, served as a provocateur for this workshop session. She spoke of the early lessons she learned from her mentors, particularly her mother and grandmother, who taught her the value of listening and understanding diverse perspectives and influenced her dedication to community engagement.
Characteristics of Successful Engagement
Barrett highlighted several important characteristics of mature engaged relationships and community partnerships that should underpin
both community engagement and meaningful measurement of engaged research:
- Community expertise: Community members need to be recognized as experts, stressing that the word “expert” comes from “experience,” which communities often possess. Failing to recognize community expertise, she said, misses the opportunity to capitalize on the potential of true partnerships to create meaningful change.
- Trust: Although researchers frequently ask how they can build trust in communities, Barrett suggested that the more pertinent question is how researchers and institutions can become more trustworthy. Approaching communities with the aim of building trust—instead of focusing on the actions that researchers and institutions need to take to be trustworthy—implies that the community has a problem that needs to be fixed, she explained. Because many systems have historically been untrustworthy, particularly to marginalized and minoritized groups, an inward examination with community insights and expertise is critical to make systemic and organizational change toward trustworthiness.
- Financial investment: “We invest in what we value,” Barrett said, pointing out that true engagement requires investment at all levels—from federal funding to small foundation grants. “If we really believe and we value community engagement, we’re going to invest in it. If your [funding or research] portfolio is not looking like that [by being diverse and reflecting the importance of community engagement], then you already have answered your own question,” she noted.
- Words that matter: Words have power, Barrett emphasized, criticizing the continued use of terms like “subjects” to describe research participants, which dehumanizes and undermines their contributions. She advocated for referring to community members as colleagues and partners—words that better recognize their collaboration and vital expertise. Barrett intentionally uses such words as community leaders or community colleagues to refer to her partners.
- Interpersonal elements: As with personal relationships, noted Barrett, true research partnerships involve honesty, openness, respect, compromise, transparency, and a willingness to ask and listen to difficult questions. If we do not ask hard questions, “we never find out where we need to be, how we need to grow, and in what ways,” Barrett said.
Ultimately, an important measure of institutional transformation is the impact that community engagement has on systems, the culture, and the narratives of an organization.
Project ENTRUST
To illustrate building a trustworthy environment in which meaningful partnerships can occur, Barrett shared the process she employed with Project ENTRUST,1 an ongoing initiative with the aim of addressing trustworthiness and trust in health care and research functions at the Duke University School of Medicine. The project involved
- engaging more than 40 stakeholders and community experts and over 600 community members in a 12-month process to identify key draft focus areas and questions related to trustworthiness in research and health care at Duke;
- engaging 15 community-based organizations, with “studios” for community members to provide insights on trust and trustworthiness, with full compensation, as a way for Duke to hear more community perspectives about this important work toward systems transformation in these care areas;
- convening a 20+ person community stakeholder advisory board; and
- focusing research on systemic and structural racism and inequities in health.
Describing these steps, she noted that leadership participation and support from multiple departments, as well as from the highest levels of the institution, were crucial for driving the effort forward. Along with community members, Project ENTRUST engaged patients and “invisible” Duke health employees, including environmental services personnel, medical assistants, and food service workers. Overlap can exist between these groups, Barrett pointed out: “We talk about the community as if they are only outside and they do not work inside our organizations, and we have to recognize that [they are inside as well].”
Community partners took the lead at every step of Project ENTRUST, Barrett explained, from defining the study’s purpose and goals, to calling for a survey and designing it, to interpreting data. The survey measured
- demographic data,
- source of care,
- barriers to care,
- views on the research enterprise and the institution,
- attitudes toward trustworthiness of institutional research and researchers,
- avoidance of care,
- clinical interactions and health care trustworthiness,
___________________
- experiences of discrimination and bias,
- institutional and organizational trust, and
- trustworthiness of the institution as a community partner.
Over an 8-week period, 6,243 participants representing patients, employees, community residents, and community-based organizations completed the survey. It was particularly powerful to capture the thousands of stories of both trust and mistrust that people shared through the survey, explained Barrett. Moreover, people not only shared their experiences but also offered potential solutions. Then, instead of the traditional approach in which researchers analyze data, draw conclusions, and present results to the community, community partners interpreted the qualitative and quantitative data and provided their insights and recommended solutions in community town halls that included smaller breakout groups.
This approach led to actionable community-driven outcomes addressing such issues as discrimination, bias, and the overall patient and community experiences in health care, research, and partnerships. “[Duke and the community] are actually now working together toward creating the kind of change needed to truly transform the organization from the outside in instead of from the inside out. Centering community insights and expertise is necessary to meaningfully advance trust and trustworthiness in our organizations and create a more equitable, inclusive health care and research environment,” Barrett stated.
PARTICIPANTS’ IDEAS FOR MEASURES
Farooque invited participants to imagine a world in which metrics are designed to capture what is truly valued, focusing on outcomes and incorporating qualitative measures. Through an interactive activity, participants shared ideas on measures, processes, and outcomes that could be established to align metrics of excellence and success with institutional key values; those ideas are in Appendix C. Emily Ozer, planning committee member and clinical and community psychologist and professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted the wealth of existing measurement tools mentioned in participants’ comments. She emphasized the need for a meta-network to share these resources across disciplines. Focusing on adapting and co-designing existing measures to fit researchers’ specific contexts could avoid the need to reinvent methods, she said.
Several key points related to measuring trustworthiness and relationship building were raised by the participants:
- Eboné Lockett, chief executive officer and principal consultant of Harvesting Humanity, emphasized the importance of community-led professional development as a means of building trustworthiness
- and relationships while bolstering the expertise of both academics and community partners.
- Prajakta Adsul, assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of New Mexico, called attention to the Engage for Equity project (see Chapter 4), which adapted principles of trustworthiness from the Association of American Medical Colleges to create a scale for measuring trustworthiness in communication between researchers and community partners.
- Marisol Morales, executive director of the Carnegie Elective Classifications and assistant vice president at the American Council on Education, noted that universities often have “boundary spanners”—people with established relationships with trusted community figures. To enhance trust and engagement, researchers need to engage boundary spanners to bridge gaps between academic and community settings, she said. Leveraging students’ dual identities as community members and scholars can also build trust between institutions and communities, she pointed out.
A participant mentioned that the success of collaborative relationships can also be gauged by the level of voluntary participation and interest—increasing demand for collaborative opportunities is a strong indicator of success and engagement, he noted.
Farooque concluded the session by reflecting on the dual purpose of measurement. While measurement can be used to prove success, it is also of critical use in facilitating learning, ensuring that engaged research practices are “moving at the pace of trust.”
This page intentionally left blank.
