¶ … communities and academia work together on public health research? The article was a formative evaluation of the first 4 years of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (URC), a community-based participatory research partnership that was founded in 1995 with funds from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The goal of the research was to examine the evaluation efforts looking at the URC, and presents the results of those evaluations so that people funding community partnerships can assess those partnership approaches to public health. The evaluations were qualitative, rather than quantitative in nature, though the researchers made efforts to codify the results so that they could be presented in a quantitative manner as well as a qualitative manner. By doing so, they could see, at a glance, how many of the stakeholders mentioned particular parts of the project in a positive way and how many of them mentioned particular parts of the project in a negative way. The evaluation focuses...

For 1996, they used a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with then-current board members and key stakeholders. For 1999, they used a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with then-current board members and key stakeholders. The interviews had 100% response rates. For the interview results, the interviewer and an assistant both took written notes; the notes were reconciled, and then transcribed. Results were then coded to see potential matches between the different responses of the various stakeholders.…