Lessons Learned: Community Based Participatory Research with Mosque Communities

Background & Purpose: Muslim Americans are a growing ethnically and racially diverse community, yet they remain socially marginalized and understudied by social work researchers. Concerns about surveillance and being targeted by government policies in the current sociopolitical environment lead Muslims to hesitate to participate in research. With increasing anti-Muslim sentiment, discrimination, and hate crimes, researchers are documenting the negative consequences of such experiences on the health and help-seeking behaviors of Muslims, thus making it more critical to address health disparities in this community. Baseline data about Muslim health is limited because religious affiliation has not typically been captured in research samples. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) conducted in collaboration with Muslim communities can be an effective tool for understanding and promoting the health of Muslim Americans. Although CBPR approaches have been utilized in many communities, few studies document CBPR efforts among mosque communities. This presentation will highlight lessons learned from a study that applied a CBPR approach to understand the healthcare beliefs, behaviors, and challenges of Muslim Americans, and summarizes the results of a review of the literature on CBPR with American mosque communities.

Methods: Our case study grows from a partnership among the University of Michigan and four Muslim-focused community organizations in Southeast Michigan. These organizations included a health and social services organization, a policy institute, and two umbrella organizations representing more than 25 mosques. Representatives from each of these organizations, along with academic advisors and local community leaders, formed a collaborative team which met monthly and was involved in all phases of the research. For over 18 months, our partnership implemented a two-phase study that included interviews with stakeholders, focus groups, and surveys with mosque congregants. In addition, we conducted a review of the literature using a combination of the following search terms: CBPR, Muslims, mosques, community engaged research, research engagement, and action research.

Results: Our case study demonstrates how CBPR may be applied for health research in mosque communities. Our review of the literature identified only one other study that used CBPR with mosques in the United States. Most papers focused on CBPR with immigrant populations who are predominately Muslim (e.g. Somalis and Afghanis), but they did not focus on mosque communities. Although we successfully engaged seven mosques in data collection and dissemination, we faced significant challenges in maintaining the involvement of community partners and sustaining the project partnership. Our experience suggests that successful CBPR efforts require employing cultural insiders, culturally adapting research methods, and developing a research platform within the organizational infrastructures of the community.

Conclusions & Implications: Social workers are called to provide culturally competent services and to conduct culturally sensitive, anti-oppressive research. CBPR offers promise in helping to meet these ethical calls. Using CBPR approaches within mosque communities has the potential for great benefit, yet inadequate infrastructures make it challenging to sustain partnerships and keep community partners engaged. This presentation will identify ways to build capacity for CBPR partnerships within mosque communities and to instill ownership of and commitment to health research within Muslim communities.