What is Community Research?

Research has been the basis of decision-making based on facts and data for a long time. It is a way of finding and gathering information in a systematic way that can help you to review how you are doing and to plan for the future. Research done with the aim of facilitating decision-making to increase engagement and achieve evolving and impactful change by a community organisation is generally termed community research.

Community researchers are often from the communities they are researching, or they represent a charity or community organisation to focus on a particular project or theme. They have a greater level of trust and communication with members of the community and can lead to not only carrying out excellent quality research, often better than qualified researchers because of trust dynamics, but also proactively co-create solutions and community projects to solve problems.

Why is community research necessary?

There are various reasons why community research is necessary. At the heart of many functions of a successful organisation are research skills. Understanding beneficiaries’ wants and needs, as well as monitoring and evaluating impact, utilise research skills. In order to capture data in a valid and ethical way, good research skills are drawn upon. 

Funders are increasingly asking community organisations to demonstrate the need for their services by offering proof of their efficacy, statistics on the number of users, or information on the benefits of those users. They must also answer to funders, the larger community, and their users. They must also demonstrate to funders that they are engaging with and sometimes consulting with their users.  In a climate of tight control on local government spending, each service needs to show its unique value. The drive for being more people-led and evidence-led will mean that community organisations are utilising research skills more often. 

What are the benefits of community research? 

Community researchers can create a better evidence base for the needs of a community and present tailored solutions to the community under research. Research carried out by a community group can help to assess the particular needs and wants of a group of people or local community by identifying trends in services, mapping existing local services and organisations, and finding out what others are doing. Communities can then plan their resources well and develop strategies to make the best out of given constraints. They can also find out if people’s needs are being met by monitoring and evaluating a service or a project by measuring some key metrics.

Community researchers explore their community through, often creative, engagement activities. They can identify deeper insights into perceptions, beliefs, needs, and challenges, getting better quality understanding than other researchers or what quantitative surveys cannot deliver – the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind the what – there are important stories behind statistics – it is time to find them, share them and use them to inform decision making. 

Knowing and understanding their community, community researchers can adapt the research design and process according to the requirements of the community they are researching – increasing the quality of the questions asked and the information collected. 

Co-creation of public engagement and consultation

By forming partnerships and collaboration with other organisations and sectors, community researchers can get deeper into communities and reach those who are often labelled hard-to-reach, and are often marginalised or not included in important decisions that affect them. Community researchers contribute to a greater sharing of knowledge. 

Public sector organisations would do well to work with and commission the community sector to increase quality participation in their community engagement and consultation activities. 

We here at Kingfisher Commons are obligated to serve the community and the public sector around the world to create a greater impact and achieve desired goals by providing training and consultancy services. 

We are creating an implementation program on community research that provides community organisations with everything they need to develop their research skills and apply them to their community engagement and monitoring and evaluation activities and processes. The ultimate goal is to help them become more people-led and make more informed decisions. 

Thanks for reading!