Pieces of the Puzzle: Scaling Community-Engaged Research to a Statewide Level

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I was excited to read this paper as this is a very important issue- how do we scale up our local CER to the state level? This is so important for analyzing the impacts of programs that affect communities state-wide. However, the paper leaves much to be desired in terms of actually helping the reader understand how to scale the approach. I find three main issues in the paper which should be addressed in order for their paper to be relevant to other researchers:

1. The authors want to aggregate their findings up to the state level from interviews with organizations across the state. They are looking to understand how different programs affected the communities, but it is not clear whether all of the communities were affected by the same programs, or subset of programs. This issue needs to be addressed directly- for example, were some communities affected by multiple programs? Were there important interactions between the programs on the communities? None of this is spelled out, but it seems pretty important.
2. In the abstract, the authors claim “Below we detail our experience of soliciting input from local community stakeholders and document how that led to recommendations around new policy.” However, in the paper they do not include how this led to recommendations around new policy, which would have been great to see.
3. the authors don't really explain how they unified the findings across the communities and scale it up to a unified vision. In particular, they do not talk about heterogeneity across communities, and how these differences are reconciled. In fact, no differences across communities are discussed. Are the authors only looking at how these communities react in similar ways? What explains the heterogeneity in responses?

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper is well structured and contextualised.  A considerable amount of detail is included that is not really referred to again in the article, e.g. listing the three communities selected and the 10 case studies, yet no direct reference is made to these in the discussion. 

Findings are summarized into the identification of two common themes mentioned in lines 338-339:  that community engagement improves the felt impact of programs, and that smaller organizations are less able to access programs and more.  To be honest, these two findings are somewhat underwhelming. They would be more compelling if some of the data gathered through the methodology (outlined in detail) was deployed as supporting evidence. As it is, the paper while addressing community engaged research, reads as quite abstract and detached from the on-the-ground realities.  Some of the earlier detail in the paper could be compressed to make space for meaningful excerpts from focus/groups, interviews etc, which would enliven the discussion. 

Minor points: 

Line 7 provide the appropriate term for the acronym EJ

Line  242  Results is a misnomer as this section really deals with methodology and no substantive results are reported.

Line 267-269 inelegant sentence should be reworded.

Line 302-304 inelegant sentence should be reworded.

Line 335-338 sentence needs to be crisper and sharper. Perhaps break into two.

Line 346-348 word repetition, tighten sentence. 

Line 369-375 An example is provided but in a shorthand way so that it is difficult for the reader to interpret.  This relates back to the main criticism that the paper is about the important of CER but doesn't include any evidence of  the community voices (evidence) which lead to the findings.  

 

  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article introduces a research project designed to explore the scaling up of community-engaged research (CER) methods to the statewide level. Although the attempt to scale up CER methods from the local to the statewide level is highly relevant to the journal and its scope, I nevertheless invite the author(s) to review the article’s approach and to revise some specific paragraphs, which are currently unclear and lack sufficient information to fully convey the meaning of the research.

First of all, the overall organization of the article does not seem to follow what the titles of each section suggest. In section 1.1, for example, the article anticipates content that would be more appropriately placed in the results section, as it describes research activities that have already been conducted and have produced specific findings. Conversely, in the “Results” section I found some elements that, in my view, would be more appropriately included in the “Materials and Methods” section, such as information related to sampling, methods, and data collection techniques, among others. A thorough revision of the article is therefore strongly recommended, reorganizing the content to better fit the purpose of each section. 

Secondly, community-engaged research is adequately presented, but somewhat uncritically. There is no shortage of reflections in the literature on the pitfalls and failures associated with the adoption of this approach, which should also be acknowledged and discussed here, possibly by expanding the range of references. We recommend, among others:
Bertram, E.; Bullock, H.E. Community-Engaged Research for Economic Justice: Reflections on Concepts and Practices. Social Sciences 2023, 12, 529.

Finally, in Section 3.3, “Unifying Local Experiences into a Statewide Narrative” seemed to me not to describe in sufficient detail the process of moving from the local context to the broader, statewide context. The authors are requested to provide further details on this point. How were the “common themes” that initiate the process identified? Which stakeholders participated in the validation process, and how were they involved? Since the discussion and conclusions are limited by the lack of a detailed description of the process unifying local communities, a revision is therefore recommended.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for responding to my original concerns. However, the overall premise that CER scaled to the state level should only focus on finding commonalities rather than understanding the underlying reasons for heterogeneity make this study limited in its policy relevance and contribution to the literature. Whether you can conduct this heterogeneity analysis is unclear at this point. At minimum, I need to see a discussion of why heterogeneity across communities doesn't matter for this paper and why it's not important for this paper or for your work to categorize the reasons for such underlying heterogeneity, even if it can help state leaders understand how things vary over space and better target policies to a local level.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Definitely an improvement, thank you for addressing my concern. I have no more comments.