Grant: Doctoral Research Award: HIV/AIDS CBR Program - General Stream

Canada's strategy to fight HIV/AIDS, "Leading Together", identifies priority actions to improve social factors that affect health: poverty, gender, disability, and discrimination. Community-based research (CBR) methods involve collaboration between university researchers, community partners, and the people affected by the research, and are well suited to study the effects of social factors on health. More and more, funding bodies and governments are requiring a CBR approach. Community organizations are demanding to play a more active role in research. The results obtained through CBR identify ways to improve services, help strengthen funding applications, and help make programs more sustainable. However, community organizations face challenges to participate in CBR: tight time constraints, high staff turnover, and limited resources and funding. The applicant will study what helps HIV/AIDS service organizations to conduct CBR, and what prevents them from doing so. She will determine how best to enhance their capacity for research, and study the potential impact this would have on addressing the social factors that affect health. She will explore the potential role that a national organization, the Canadian AIDS Society, could play in enhancing HIV/AIDS organizations' capacity for CBR. Research Questions: 1. What helps HIV/AIDS service organizations to engage in CBR, and what hinders them? Is there a role for a national organization to play in making it easier for HIV/AIDS service organizations to conduct CBR? 2. What are the potential impacts of enhancing CBR for addressing the social factors that make communities more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS? What forms of CBR are best suited to achieve this? Enhancing HIV/AIDS service organizations' capacity to engage in forms of CBR that are best suited to address the social factors that affect health would lead to better community services, and ultimately to reduced social and health factors that drive the HIV/AIDS epidemic.