A Belgian Story of CBPR Among People with a Migration Background

About three years ago, I decided I was in need of a new professional challenge. At the time I had been working as a practice oriented researcher in the social work field for about four years. My previous projects were practice based and policy oriented and involved studying people with a migration background, acceptance of difference in society and fair integration of these people in elderly care and education. These projects also involved amplifying the voices of vulnerable people with a migration background, to open communication about inequalities in general society. In 2015, the Institute of Social Drug Research (Ghent University, Belgium) hired me to conduct and help coordinate a community–based participatory research project on substance use and treatment for addiction in people with a migration background. A challenge indeed because this type of research had never been conducted in Belgium and the topic of the research is understudied in Belgium. We worked with a team of four researchers, each one based in a different university department and working with a sub target group of ‘people with a migration background’.

We mainly chose the CBPR design because substance use is often a taboo topic among people with a migration background. Additionally, it is not easy for researchers to reach substance users in these populations. Maybe we choose the design because of the wrong reasons, prioritizing target group reach, over empowerment and equity. However, the design did allow us to work with over 40 community researchers to collaboratively conduct four case studies in and with the Turkish community in the Ghent municipality, the Eastern European communities in the Ghent Municipality, the Congolese communities in Brussels and undocumented migrants and refugees across target groups and municipalities.

The idea was to reach the target groups better by working with community organizations and researchers and finally to build a bridge between research and the lived experience of addiction care, general welfare social work as well as communities of people with a migration background. The study was based in a collaboration between four project assistants (one per case study and myself as coordinating staff member and researcher in the Turkish community), a community organization per case study and a community advisory board. The selected community organizations differed substantially: first, one of the organizations did not receive any structural funding which made it hard to build up a structural working relation, second, three out of four organizations did not want to be affiliated too much with the topic of substance use and third, the target groups of the organizations differed: one aimed at a single ‘ethnic group’, another aimed at several ‘ethnic groups’ and a last aimed at vulnerable drug users, including those having a migration background. This illustrates that the CBPR method, as devised in a North American research context requires significant cultural adaptation in a European context.

The community advisory board consisted of people from the socio–cultural work field, local policy makers and practitioners in drug prevention and treatment. The involvement of a community advisory board facilitated the identification of missing populations in the study sample and dissemination of practice–oriented recommendations to treatment and welfare organizations. All actors were involved in refining the research questions, guiding the project and finding participants from the target groups and disseminating the research results. Nevertheless, the main research question was quite rigidly defined before the project had started: What is the nature of substance use in the four ‘communities’ and which needs do target groups have towards addiction treatment facilities?

The project consisted of four consecutive stages: (1) finding suitable community organizations and forming the community advisory boards, (2) finding and training community researchers, (3) gathering semi–structured interviews, doing field work and (4) analyzing the data and disseminating it in academia, the professional field and the target groups. This project took 15 months.

Each project assistant contributed to finding community researchers by means of personal contacts, mail shots, flyers, posters and the organization of info sessions in the community organizations. Eligibility criteria for community researchers were that (1) they could recruit at least 10 respondents, (2) they...