Community Researchers Meet Community Residents: Interpretation of Findings

Increasingly, investigators who undertake community research are held accountable not only by their peers in academic and research organizations but also by the residents in the community where research is being done. Responsive researchers are paying much more attention to the problems of entry and of ethics as related to community studies.Whatever the validity or justification put forward by the community, unless the research person takes the time to understand the process that leads to such feelings, there is a good possibility that no research on current pressing social problems can be done. This paper reports on a session organized at the April, 1972 Society for Applied Anthropology meetings, which attempted to bring together community residents and research investigators to discuss findings of three community studies as well as strategies of research. This paper consists of four parts: (1) summaries of three formal papers; (2) discussion of strategies and ethics of community research; (3) problems o...