Establishing the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study (CHIWOS): Operationalizing Community-based Research in a Large National Quantitative Study

Our team, including women with HIV, identified early on that in order to create meaningful knowledge on the health and care of women with HIV, a comprehensive understanding of community experiences and needs was essential and thus the vital need to use a CBR approach emerged. As our experience with CBR has evolved, we have been tasked with reflecting on how the study team has operationalized CBR principles, our successes, and our challenges from both academic and community lenses. Our joint perspective creates a comprehensive dialogue about the value of CBR, as we have formed a team with significant diversity, from clinicians to epidemiologists, research assistants to PRAs.

Conceptually, CHIWOS was born out of pursuing topics based on community identified needs and the potential impact for improving care for women with HIV. The newly formed CHIWOS team began the project by brainstorming and developing a study vision, mission, mandate and values (Table 1), all of which were led and informed by community expertise. Table 2 presents our theoretical and research frameworks and guiding principles, which include critical feminism, anti-oppression, intersectionality and social justice [29‐31]. This was followed by a two-year long formative phase, which included qualitative data collection with women from across the country to inform our understanding of WCHC. The CHIWOS team then embarked on a year-long CBR survey development process described elsewhere [32]. Community members, including trained PRAs and other women with HIV, were asked to pilot and revise the survey. After piloting the draft questionnaire, PRAs and participants were asked to describe their experience, and explain any concerns related to the survey. The crucial community feedback garnered from these discussions informed subsequent revisions, including: cutting sections that felt redundant, unjustifiably intrusive, or excessively long; rephrasing questions to better reflect the needs, understandings, and identities of women; and adjusting skip patterns to ensure the relevance of questions to particularly situated women. These insights were essential to informing the development of the final survey and, ultimately, the involvement of a wide inter-disciplinary team.

A critical aspect of the CBR process was to work with and train PRAs, and importantly, to provide them with the support necessary to ensure their ongoing involvement in the project. A team of 8-28 PRAs was hired and trained in each province. A national team developed the curriculum for the training based on principles of participatory adult learning and the insights of modules developed for other studies. Provincial trainings were organized over several days to build relationships amongst the team members; review important concepts; discuss the CHIWOS project and its approach, research principles, and team structure; provide practical training around recruiting and obtaining consent from potential participants, administering the online survey instrument, accessing the supports available to PRAs, and other relevant information. An anonymous evaluation was solicited from the PRAs to inform subsequent trainings and ongoing learning opportunities. A secure online platform for PRA training and networking was also created for refresher training and newly hired PRAs. We also created a process through which PRAs connect on a regular basis with each other and provincial coordinators and investigators to provide input and receive updates, usually through monthly teleconference. The support provided to each PRA needed to be tailored to the unique needs of the individual. Understanding the needs of each PRA occurred over time and policies were developed and recorded in order to ensure that these strategies were upheld.

PRAs experienced challenges due to the varying expectations of what their new role would encompass. Consequently, the team had to be innovative in ensuring each PRA felt that their contributions were manageable and meaningful depending on each PRAs capacities and interests. In light of this, new opportunities were developed for the PRAs to be involved in the project in a variety of leadership capacities. Some of these positions include being National Management Team and Knowledge Translation and Exchange Working Group PRA Representatives. We have also learned that meaningful involvement and adequate support for PRAs must include appropriate compensation, recognition and acknowledgement. For any voluntary commitment there is no pressure or expectation that PRAs attend. This process has been challenging because, ideally, PRAs should be compensated for all of their work. The consequence of not being able to financially afford this ideal presents challenges to acknowledging all contributions.

Through the unique role of being a PRA, many women continue to experience the challenge of “wearing many hats”. On several occasions, PRAs have completed interviews with friends, family members or clients. Furthermore, they may be perceived and treated differently by women in the community based on their new PRA position within CHIWOS. These experiences also tie into the challenge of setting appropriate boundaries with participants and navigating the thin line that exists between these varying relationships due to the multiple roles of the PRA. CHIWOS has developed “Challenging Scenario Guidelines” to support PRAs experiencing challenges brought to the forefront throughout the project.

Despite these ups and downs, the CHIWOS PRAs are the heart of this project. In partnership with various clinical and community sites in each province, PRAs have led the national cohort data collection phase. Word of mouth, recruiting from their personal and professional networks and utilizing peer-driven recruitment strategies have been the most successful strategies. The community connections, experiences, and aptitudes of our PRAs have also enabled successful recruitment from many under-served and harder-to-reach communities. Consequently, our cohort is inclusive of trans people, women who have experience with sex work, First Nations, Métis and Inuit women, women with a history of incarceration, African, Caribbean and Black women, and women not accessing care.

While our successes can feasibly be implemented by future research teams where CBR is well suited, the challenges that we have encountered raise important considerations for how to resolve, or at least attempt to resolve, the tensions that ultimately emerge when taking a CBR approach to national research. A key tension that we continue to struggle with is the reality that our consultative process requires more time. This is poorly understood and accepted at a bureaucratic level. We have also experienced issues with PRA compensation at a bureaucratic level. These two challenges capture the team’s overall experience of navigating CBR within large academic settings that are unfamiliar with a CBR process. In consideration of planning a large-scale CBR project, it would be advisable to meet with leadership within your institution to ensure they understand and will fully support the CBR process.

Because CHIWOS was developed as a CBR project with a specific emphasis on equity and anti-oppressive approaches to research, power imbalances, such as decision-making roles, also occurred providing the research team with the opportunity to reflect and find solutions aimed to maximize decision-making equitability. The most effective solution was expanding communication. Establishing an understanding in the formative phase of each team member’s role, contributions, communication style, and skills was also particularly vital to the sustainability and success of this large, national CBR guided project.

Given the predominant quantitative expertise among the research team, there were also challenges in shifting toward a CBR approach that needed to be openly discussed. This entailed, and will continue to entail, ongoing reflective discussions that work toward identifying possible methodological and ethical tensions that often emerge when doing CBR that relies on multiple forms of knowledge [33]. These tensions are not easily resolvable, but our reflective attention to them reinforces and supports our accountability to enact the long list of critical feminist principles and core values that guide us in our research.