2024/10/01 by Rebecca M. Crocker, Emma Torres, Maia Ingram +1 · 2 voices · 1 citation
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Community Health and Development #Health Policy Implementation Science #Participatory Visual Research Methods
paper · doi:10.1080/08884552.2024.2378331
openalex publication_date 2024/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Community health workers can play a critical role in health promotion research, bringing hands-on lived experience and local knowledge to community-based participatory research project collaborations with research institutions. Their participation in studies has been shown to improve research quality across all phases, including participant recruitment and retention and reliable data collection, as well as ensuring that studies produce data to inform future culturally congruent interventions. In this compilation, we reflect on the increasing role that promotores (the term used for community health workers in the US-Mexico border region) play in promoting action and justice-oriented research endeavors and tell the story of the long-standing collaboration between researchers from the University of Arizona’s College of Public Health and a farmworker support agency based in Yuma, Arizona called Campesinos Sin Fronteras. In 2019, the University of Arizona and Campesinos Sin Fronteras initiated La Vida en La Frontera, a mixed methods longitudinal study aimed to characterize the stressors facing border residents and the resilience that mitigates the potential health impacts of that stress. In this issue, five of the promotores who were instrumental in designing and implementing La Vida en La Frontera write about the challenges they faced as researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what they learned about barriers to healthcare, social isolation, and chronic disease. In addition, they reflect upon how the study came to impact participants and encourage them to make meaningful life changes and ultimately how it came to shape their own professional growth. These reflections are indicative of the critical ways in which community health workers enrich and validate community-based health research projects.