Engaging communities in health intervention research/practice

Asking communities to participate in heath intervention is an increasingly popular strategy in public health and health promotion. The Community Health Educator Model, developed through a series of Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects in cancer screening in the UK during the 1990s, is a participatory health intervention model that emphasises community engagement. Although the model has been adopted by many health districts in the UK, little is known about the effectiveness of its appropriation; crucially, how researchers/practitioners engage with communities has seldom been reported. This paper presents the author's reflection on her experience in developing a set of community organising tools to respond to the diversity found in communities in practice. It suggests that engagement can be enhanced if the contingent and constructed nature of the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘community’ in the real world can be better understood. Researchers and practitioners need to cultivate a tolerance to difference and ambiguity so as to negotiate the ever-shifting boundary of engagement.