Fundamentals of Social Identity and Social Justice: Considering Social Identity Within CBPR With Marginalized Populations

Abstract

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a research paradigm that works with marginalized populations within health contexts. The partnership between scholars and marginalized populations empowers participants through the pursuit of social justice. However, there has been a cry for standardizing the CBPR approach particularly when working with marginalized populations. Identity is a critical construct to understand within the communities in order to collectively strive toward social justice. This paper examines how social identity theory can aid community-based participatory research teams by (a) illustrating how social identity analysis can facilitate the researcher-community partnership, (b) applying SIT to better understand community behaviors and norms, and (c) using SIT to avoid unintended consequences within CBPR intervention designs. Through understanding identity, relational empowerment can be positively redistributed back to community members. This paper will thus serve as a first step in justifying why more research is needed in incorporating social identity to CBPR intervention designs.

Understanding the identity of lived experience researchers and providers: A conceptual framework and systematic narrative review

“…The review found the idea of empowerment through lived experience researcher and provider work and this may occur through a social justice motivation (Huse, 2020). Through lived experience researcher and provider roles that are politically motivated, formed of activists and advocates means they are moving away from individual motivations to make a difference to a collective motivation to make a difference for others like themselves.…”