Table 4.

Perspectives on What Community Engagement Is For

	Summary	Illustrative Quotes & Examples
CE for Study Facilitation
4A	CE in the service of study procedures	“The engagement is seen as really closely tied to recruitment and enrollment … generating interest and enthusiasm for the [study].” (Research staff)
4B	CE as instrumental, transactional	“The metrics are basically, did 30 people come to your barbecue?” and “the number of people who we engaged … the people who got materials… Did people sign up?” (Research Staff)
CE for Community Benefit
4C	CE to benefit community health	“You have to understand how does being in a community, and the interactions, and the connections that people have, and the conversations and the thought processes that individuals have in the community … understanding that so that we can disseminate and develop interventions…You can’t just go and say, ‘Here’s cardiovascular disease information. Take it and run with it.’ … Understanding how you take uptake, retention and really how people take action on the messages. So the goal is to really develop sustainable intervention … And changing behavior.” (Research staff) “I’m hoping that [the investigators] are trying to always … ask … ‘What does this mean to the community that I’m serving that I’m trying to impact and how do we get there? How do we get that brief or that publication transferrable to where it’s palatable that it can be given to the community in some form or fashion? How can it be disseminated and translated?’” (Investigator)
4D	Community-centered research questions	“Working with those communities to design a project that is going to include them and things that are of interest to them. So, what are they going to get out of this? Is there something that their community is particularly interested in studying?… If people were saying … this is a question we really want to know the answer to … then … the community [could be more] willing to contribute the data to answer that question… The resource would become richer. I think that the science that was being done would be more diverse, and this process would become more transparent, and therefore engender greater trust which would bring more people into [the study] over time … There’s just … a lot of knock-on effects there.” (Research staff)
CE for Building Relational Capital
4E	CE to cultivate & maintain long-term relationships	“I think the biggest thing to me is funding community-based research that persists over time…what we hear over and over and over again for our more diverse advisers is you can’t just pop into a community, give them results, and then leave … Increasing funding to maintain relationships over time so that you are able to stay connected to communities and it’s part of your work, I think, is the most important thing … That’s difficult when you have competing people for grants and you might have one grant and then you don’t get the grant the next time … Funding more cohort studies [so] that there’s expected funding over time to keep people engaged, and funding outreach and community engagement is probably something that I would just think would be most helpful.” (Investigator) “I don’t think that [the researchers] were really equipped for how long and how deep the effort is needed to create through community engagement over time.” (Research staff)