Completing the Circle: A Model for Effective Community Review of Environmental Health Research

Abstract

While it is well understood that multiple and cumulative environmental stressors negatively impact health at the community level, existing ethical research review procedures are designed to protect individual research participants but not communities. Increasing concerns regarding the ethical conduct of research in general and environmental and genetic research in particular underscore the need to expand the scope of current human participant research regulations and ethical guidelines to include protections for communities. In an effort to address this issue, West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT), a nonprofit, community-based environmental justice organization in New York City that has been involved in community-academic partnerships for the past decade, used qualitative interview data to develop a pilot model for community review of environmental health science research.