Clarifying the why, what, how, and when of community engagement: exploring the communication tactics employed by community-based organizations to engage underserved communities
Creators: name: Goulbourne, Taylor
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: The primary focus of this dissertation was to unpack the role of communication in community engagement processes. Engagement is a central construct in communication theory and research but has been mainly conceptualized and operationalized at the individual level. As a result, the field has produced a comprehensive and nuanced account of engagement as a psychosocial construct and developed robust measures of engagement to match. However, these do not naturally or logically extend to engagement at the community level. Therefore, a critical first step for this dissertation was to develop a conception and operationalization of community engagement that connects the communication perspective on engagement with the accepted, longstanding definition of community engagement in other fields. This requires identifying critical dimensions of community engagement that are expected to be directly or indirectly associated with community communication structures, mechanisms, and processes that can explain variations in individual and population health outcomes. The updated conception of the role and function of communication in community engagement goes beyond the traditional focus on translation and dissemination to define a continuum of community engagement that is defined according to community participation and empowerment. The conceptual framework that emerged from this exercise explicates communication structures, mechanisms and processes that can enable each form of community engagement on this continuum based on the synthesis and integration of the literature on communication and community engagement. A theoretical model that seeks to explain the choice of community engagement strategies and tactics made by community engagement practitioners as a function of three factors – perceived community readiness, organizational readiness, and community engagement goal – was derived from this synthesis and integration of the literature. A primary goal of this dissertation project was to both confirm and improve the validity and potential utility of this framework by comparing it with the perspective and experience of community engagement practitioners. To this end, a total of fifteen semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with employees and board members of eight community-based organizations that primarily or exclusively serve marginalized and underserved communities in a health or wellness context. The interviews were designed to extract insights regarding choice of community engagement strategies and tactics made by these organizations and the rationale for making these choices. Interview data were qualitatively analyzed. A key finding is that while consideration of organization- and community-related factors is relevant to practitioners’ choice of community engagement strategy, the process by which these factors are considered and used to inform community engagement-related decisions differs from what has been suggested in existing community engagement scholarship. For practitioners, consideration of community-related factors provides insights regarding a) what community heath-related challenges need to be addressed (i.e., community capacity) and b) how institutional and interpersonal trust can influence engagement (i.e., community motivation). While previous research has highlighted the historic missteps leading to many underserved community members not trusting health-promoting institutions (e.g., government, healthcare, faith-based) and being less motivated to engage, little research has considered the role of community members interpersonal trust in each other contributing to a low motivation and willingness to engage. Therefore, interpersonal and institutional trust was identified as both an antecedent of highly involved forms of community engagement (i.e., transformational engagement) and a goal of lesser involved community engagement strategies (i.e., transactional engagement). In addition, practitioners indicated that they seek to leverage partnerships as a critical first step in building trust and engaging community members. Throughout the interviews, partnerships were identified as a key feature of community engagement. Partnerships were also seen as a critical strategy to compensate for a lack of organizational capacity in the design, implementation, and/or evaluation of programs. Partnerships also dictated how and why communities were engaged via organizational collaboration. Therefore, an additional key finding from this dissertation was that consideration of the availability of partnerships played a more critical role in community engagement decision making than perceived community and organizational readiness to engage. These finding represent an initial, exploratory effort, to connect communication and community engagement scholarship with practitioner knowledge while highlighting interpersonal and institutional trust and partnerships as a critical bridge between communication and community engagement. Findings from this study may guide the development of specific hypotheses regarding the role of communication and community engagement as well as potentially effective community engagement interventions that draw on the knowledge and experience of community engagement practitioners who seek to thoughtfully and responsively engage marginalized and underserved communities.