Primary Submission Category: institutional factors supporting community-engaged research
Barriers to tenure and promotion for public health scholars collaborating with community partners: interview pilot study findings
Authors: irene yen, Brenda Castañeda-Castañeda, Leslie Dubbin, Marizen Ramirez, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh,
Presenting Author: irene yen*
University tenure and promotion standards feature research or scholarship, teaching, and service categories used to assess faculty progress. Typically, the gold standard criteria for evaluating merit and promotion in population sciences research is the number of peer-reviewed publications in high-impact factor journals and the impact (e.g. citation counts) of peer-reviewed publications, books, or book chapters published during a review period. Community-engaged (CE) research, which includes Community-Based Participatory Research, a hallmark of population science, may not generate academic products that meet traditional merit and promotion standards and present attendant challenges for assessing the impact of these products. CE relies on working partnerships with community organizations, informal resident networks, and/or government organizations whose interests and expectations often generate non-academic products that have high impact for communities of interest. Seeking to understand the experiences of CE researchers, we interviewed 18 faculty in public policy, education, and public health at different career stages working at two public universities for their reflections on how community-engaged scholarship was recognized and valued during the merit and promotion process. Interviews were recorded through Zoom and transcribed with Otter.ai. Key themes emerged that highlight the challenges community-engaged scholars face in securing tenure and promotion: 1) campus focus on traditional scholarly products – they are the “coin of the realm”; 2) campus undervalues CE research and its community and policy impacts; 3) because of the perceived lack of support, senior faculty discourage early career faculty from engaging in CE projects until reaching full professor status; 4) a recognition that CE work involves substantial amounts of unaccounted labor and a lack of transparent metrics in the merit and promotion process. Interview participants also provided approaches campuses could take to address these challenges including: 1) establish a campus-community engagement office; 2) update academic personnel standards language to feature more common CE products and the labor associated with CE work; and 3) devise quantitative metrics that would account for unseen labor.