CIROP MEASURE

Research partnerships between universities and community organizations or groups are increasing in number in Canada and elsewhere. These partnerships are thought to produce knowledge that informs community members and leads to more efficient service delivery, more effective clinical programs, and enhanced community development. However, there is little concrete evidence of these benefits. One reason there is little evidence is the lack of a reliable and valid tool to measure various types of community impacts on a general level. We need to be better able to describe and demonstrate the benefits of research partnerships from the perspective of community members.

Researchers from five community-university research partnerships from Ontario, Canada joined together to develop a reliable and valid survey to measure the community impacts of research partnerships between universities and community agencies. The five partnerships included:

The CIROP will inform research partnerships about the amount of impact, if any, they are having on their target audiences in the areas of Knowledge Enhancement, Research Skill Development, and Information Use. This tool is designed to measure the impact of research partnerships (in the social and health service sectors) from the perspective of community members and researchers (i.e., those receiving information or services from the partnership, or those involved in the partnership).

Research partnerships wishing to evaluate their effectiveness may invite the intended users or beneficiaries of their partnership's knowledge sharing and education efforts to complete the CIROP. This instrument also will allow community stakeholders and advisory boards to capture the success of their collaborative research initiatives.

The CIROP can also be used as a research tool to assess the effectiveness of knowledge sharing approaches, determine the most influential activities of research partnerships, and determine structural characteristics of partnerships associated with various types of impact. The CIROP provides a better understanding of community members’ perspectives and expectations of research partnerships, with important implications for knowledge transfer and uptake.

We created items for the measure based on:

• Items of impact from the research literature that reflected the 3 mid-term impact domains in our Impact Model (i.e., Knowledge Enhancement, Research Skill Enhancement, and Information Use).
• Information gained from focus groups with key informants.

To evaluate whether our measure was reliable and valid, we invited community members and researchers, involved in any way with our Partnerships, to complete the CIROP. This testing provided us with feedback about how to refine the tool. Specific details about the development of the CIROP Measure are described in the journal article: A Measure of Community Members’ Perceptions of the Impacts of Research Partnerships in Health and Social Services.

The Impact Model can also be used to illustrate the Researcher point of view. Researchers in collaborative research partnerships work hard to generate knowledge, provide research education and training opportunities, and share knowledge. Researchers hope that their efforts will have an impact on their targeted audiences. The Researcher point of view can be seen in the Impact Model by starting at the innermost ring and moving to the outer rings (this perspective is "looking out at the community").

Community members also have important influences on research partnerships by contributing their skills, knowledge, and insights. The Impact Model attempts to capture the reciprocal nature of research partnerships through the use of "ripples".

The following version of the Impact Model is a visual portrayal of the community and community members "looking in" at research partnerships. This figure portrays the relationship of the CIROP scales—which capture the major types of benefits in the eyes of community members—to the three main functions of research partnerships. Recipients/community members see research outputs as tools they can potentially utilize. They focus on the things they gain from the research education and training, and knowledge sharing functions of partnerships-these are the areas of benefit captured in the four CIROP scales.

For further information see the journal article: A Measure of Community Members' Perceptions of the Impacts of Research Partnerships.

When viewing the model, Swipe / Click the pulsing centre point to display the next slide.