MPH 509 Week 8 CBPR Project Proposal Example

Participatory Research Proposal: The Cedar Grove Drinking Water Study, an 18-Month Partnership Between Residents, a County Health Department and a State University

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 509: Community-Based Participatory Research

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Participatory Research Proposal: The Cedar Grove Drinking Water Study, an 18-Month Partnership Between Residents, a County Health Department and a State University

The Partnership That Already Exists

This proposal comes from a partnership formed before any funding was sought. The Cedar Grove Residents' Association speaks for the households of a 212-lot park in the course's composite county. Two of its board members have kept a handwritten log of every water outage and boil-water notice since then. In 2025 the association asked the Delmar County Health Department, which had issued five boil-water notices for the park's owner-run water system in two years, why nothing had changed. That conversation led to three meetings in early 2026 with the department and the regional state university's Department of Public Health, a signed partnership agreement and the questions below. A Spanish-speaking congregation at the park entrance and the county's legal aid office serve as advisors.

The Questions and Their Origin

The study asks how much the park's water failures cost each household, counting dollars, hours and illness. It also asks what it would take for residents to believe the water is fit to drink. The health department first proposed a study of gastrointestinal illness; residents said their main concerns were cost, outages, discolored water and whether anything would change. The committee combined residents' concerns with the department's interest in health into the first question, and the association's board added the second.

Why It Matters

Manufactured home communities are often served by small, privately run water systems, which are more likely than larger systems to have health-related violations (Pierce & Gonzalez, 2017). Such disparities arise from a combination of natural conditions, infrastructure and the political and economic position of the people served (Balazs & Ray, 2014). No published study has examined drinking water in a manufactured home community through a participatory design, so the study will add both local evidence and a tested model of partnership in a setting where one owner controls both residents' land and their water.

Design and Governance

The study combines a survey offered to all 212 households, monthly tap water sampling at 30 homes chosen by residents from their outage log, diaries of outages and spending kept by 40 households, and three resident forums where findings are read before anything is written up. A six-member steering committee, three of whose members are chosen by the association, governs every phase. The association's members together can block any decision. The university alone decides laboratory and statistical methods, which it explains to the committee. Data belong to the association, held by the university as a steward, and no household-level data go to the health department or the owner. Findings are released first to residents, and the association can postpone any release for a period of up to ninety days when residents face a lease dispute.

A Budget That Shows Where Power Sits

Table 1

Study Budget by Line and Recipient

Note. Note. Composite figures; health department staff time contributed in kind.

About a third of the budget, $41,000, is paid directly to the association and its members, and nearly half, $59,100, is spent on residents and community participation once incentives, interpretation and childcare are counted. The largest single line is water testing, which residents asked for to have independent results. The university's share is smaller than the community's. Minkler (2005) observed that partnerships frequently stall on unequal resources; this budget is designed so that residents' time is paid like everyone else's.

A Timeline That Admits Its Length

The study runs 18 months: three months to hire and train the community research associates, obtain ethics approval and finalize the survey; twelve months of water sampling, with the survey in months 4 to 6 and diaries in months 4 to 15; and three months for community forums, the residents' report, then the sessions with the owner and with regulators. The academic article follows after the community report. The partnership itself took a year to build before this proposal, and the timeline does not pretend that trust can be compressed.

Ethics

The partnership will seek institutional review with its agreement attached, highlighting community-level risks that standard review often misses, such as harm to the community's reputation and the dual role of residents as researchers and participants (Flicker et al., 2007). Collective agreement on how the community is portrayed will be sought at open member meetings before data collection and before release.

Dissemination

Results go first to households, then to a community meeting and a bilingual community report, then to the owner, privately and with the association in the chair, then to regulators and the county board and finally to journals, with at least one resident as author on every academic product.

Evaluating the Partnership

The partnership will evaluate itself as well as the study. At the start, the committee agreed on questions about shared decision making, trust, resident benefit and capacity, which will be asked of all committee members at months 6, 12 and 18. The partnership will also record decisions and who made them, so that the depth of participation can be judged by others using the kind of test applied in the study's literature review (Israel et al., 1998). Participatory partnerships often produce benefits beyond their original questions, including new capacity and new projects (Jagosh et al., 2012), and the final review will ask whether the association wants to continue with a study of lot rent and housing security.

Expected Products

The study will produce household water results for 30 homes, a bilingual community report, a brief for the owner, a brief for regulators and the county board, an academic article with a published decision log and a short guide, written with the association, on how residents of other manufactured home communities can document water problems.

References

Balazs, C. L., & Ray, I. (2014). The drinking water disparities framework: On the origins and persistence of inequities in exposure. American Journal of Public Health, 104(4), 603-611. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301664

Flicker, S., Travers, R., Guta, A., McDonald, S., & Meagher, A. (2007). Ethical dilemmas in community-based participatory research: Recommendations for institutional review boards. Journal of Urban Health, 84(4), 478-493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7

Israel, B. A., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19, 173-202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.19.1.173

Jagosh, J., Macaulay, A. C., Pluye, P., Salsberg, J., Bush, P. L., Henderson, J., Sirett, E., Wong, G., Cargo, M., Herbert, C. P., Seifer, S. D., Green, L. W., & Greenhalgh, T. (2012). Uncovering the benefits of participatory research: Implications of a realist review for health research and practice. The Milbank Quarterly, 90(2), 311-346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0009.2012.00665.x

Minkler, M. (2005). Community-based research partnerships: Challenges and opportunities. Journal of Urban Health, 82(2 Suppl. 2), ii3-ii12. https://doi.org/10.1093/jurban/jti034

Pierce, G., & Gonzalez, S. R. (2017). Public drinking water system coverage and its discontents: The prevalence and severity of water access problems in California's mobile home parks. Environmental Justice, 10(5), 168-173. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2017.0006