Delve! Curriculum Preview: Using the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA)
to Evaluate Programs and Assess HIV/AIDS, Sexually Transmitted
Diseases (STDs), and Other Community Health Problems
Section 1: This section will teach novice researchers:
- The opportunities and limitations of the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA).
- Background information on the subject of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
- How to rapidly focus the research problem.
- How to refine the research problem to be studied.
Example of what you will find in this section:
Advantages and limitations of the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA)
The advantages of the REA process are multiple.
- Learning. The REA process provides participants an opportunity to learn how to conduct streamlined research and gather information they may not have previously known about their target community.
- Teamwork and stakeholders. Participation in the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment necessarily involves collaboration. The involvement of key stakeholders in the assessment process helps create interest in the outcome of the REA, because a larger community participated in designing it.
- Cost-effectiveness. Because the REA strategies are organized to streamline all planning, design, data collection, data analysis, and presentation processes, and employ non-professionals in the study, the costs of this research will amount to only a fraction of what they might be in more traditional studies.
- Timeliness. The REA can be completed in a time period of one week to three months (depending on the problem to be addressed and the specific strategies to be used).
These advantages make the REA a particularly useful approach when conducting community-based participatory research, or CBPR, which the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has defined as follows:
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Community-based participatory research is a collaborative research approach that is designed to ensure and establish structures for participation by communities affected by the issue being studied, representatives of organizations, and researchers in all aspects of the research process to improve health and well-being through taking action, including social change.(Viswanathan, et al., 2004, p. 3)
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The limitations involved in the REA process involve scope. Throughout the planning and implementation stages, learners will be reminded that they cannot do everything. Initial research questions and target communities should be limited. Data collection strategies must be streamlined. Data analyses probably will not include such statistical procedures as path modeling or multiple regression analysis, but are also likely to involve strategies the community can easily understand. Reports on findings may not be hundreds of pages long, but they will be short enough to be absorbed in a half-hour presentation or an afternoon’s reading. Limitations in scope carry disadvantages, but curiously also some advantages.
Viswanathan, M., et al. (2004). Community-based Participatory Research: Assessing the Evidence: Summary. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Evidence Report/Technology Assessment No. 99.
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