Measuring Community Power for Health Equity
AUTHOR
Vanderbilt University
Johns Hopkins University, SNF Agora Institute
P3 Lab
OVERVIEW
What research is needed to deepen understandings and practices of base building and community organizing as core to developing and sustaining community power for health equity?
In the following reports, we explore the landscape of extant interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of community power and health equity and synthesize literature on theories of social change and the measurement of community power.
Based on this analysis, we offer a research agenda that underscores the need for more responsive and dynamic measurement of power. This agenda is presented as a set of questions, consideration of which can guide research and evaluation conducted by community power building organizations, funders, and researchers in various contexts.
Research
questions
What research literature exists on the intersection of health equity and community power?
How does community power work in the real world? What are the key theories of change and base building approaches?
What are existing and potential measures of community power that may advance a forward-looking research agenda for health equity?
Key Findings
There is substantial literature, as well as conceptual and theoretical assertions, focused on the need for more research on community power in relation to health equity, but there remains a gap in the field.
Theories of change fall along a continuum that includes agentic, political process, structural, and post-structural theories.
Understanding the theories of change— as well as the practices, beliefs and tactics— of base-building groups will shed light on why some efforts are successful while others are not.
Measuring the impacts of community power on health equity require systems-level approaches, which can be more complex and challenging than assessing individual risk factors, behaviors, or disease outcomes.
Future research must attend to how community power can be developed, how it is then expressed or deployed, and what community impacts are then associated with those expressions of power.
Read the
reports
Reflections on Measuring Community Power
Hahn, Hahrie (Johns Hopkins University)
Developing Community Power for Health Equity: A Landscape Analysis of Current Research and Theory
Paul W. Speer, Jyoti Gupta & Krista Haapanen (Vanderbilt University)
A Research Agenda for Developing and Measuring Community Power for Health Equity
Paul W. Speer, Jyoti Gupta & Krista Haapanen (Vanderbilt University)