Community engagement in research: An approach to improve research relevance and use.

Abstract

Consideration of community engagement to scientific inquiry is a relatively recent development. In scientific inquiry, there have been major shifts to make the development of science and knowledge building the collective responsibility of researchers, research participants and other stakeholders (1). In the past century, we witnessed the evolution of different epistemologies – positivist, neo-positivist, postmodernist and constructivist, in particular (2). More recently there are widespread calls to move from disciplinary to transdisciplinary research and guidance by One Health approach to benefit science, knowledge building and problem solving from multiple perspectives.