Community-engaged research in the federal context can provide critical context and practical input to inform program operations and policy development. This report, from the Advancing Contextual Analysis and Methods of Participant Engagement (CAMPE) project, is for federal research staff looking to learn about engaging with community members in building knowledge, conducting research and evaluation, and improving programs.

This report summarizes findings from two key activities:

• identifying and documenting example federal research projects that incorporate community-engaged methods
• assembling and soliciting feedback from a community advisory board on several specific OPRE research practices, processes, and materials

Research Questions

1. How have recent federal research projects incorporated community-engaged methods?
2. How can a community advisory board provide feedback on OPRE’s research processes and materials?
3. How can the CAMPE project be a model for other federal offices and agencies looking to engage people with lived experience as partners in federal research and evaluation?

Purpose

Community engagement in research involves collaborating with community members as integral partners and valuing lived experience as essential expertise. But the federal context can introduce unique complexity to undertaking community-engaged research due to some of the characteristics of federally funded projects, such as their scale, multisite nature, and contracting requirements. Some federal staff may feel unequipped to use such methods.

This report summarizes results from an environmental scan of federal research and evaluation projects conducted in the past 10 years that involved community engagement. The report also describes the CAMPE project’s community advisory board (CAB), whose membersreviewed and commented on several OPRE documents and materials related to research processes over an 18-month period. 

Key Findings and Highlights

• Federal community-engaged research and evaluation can range from projects informed by community members to projects driven by community members.
• In addition to informing single research and evaluation projects, community-engagement approaches can also inform the processes and procedures that broadly affect research and evaluation activities (e.g., research procedures or guidance documents).
• The CAMPE project demonstrates how community advisory boards can inform federal office or agencywide research processes and guiding documents. 
• The CAMPE CAB generated specific recommendations for OPRE’s internal editorial style guide, the Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency Learning Agenda, a sample OPRE study informed consent process and form, and a sample OPRE study survey. The CAB recommendations emphasized factors such as precision, clarity, equity, respect, human-centered language and framing, and community benefit.