The Power of Purpose: Understanding what Motivates Community Partners’ Participation in Evaluation and Research

This is the fifth installment of a 12-part blog series discussing doing evaluation in service of racial equity as part of a collaboration with the Kellogg Foundation. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the views of any partner organizations, including the Kellogg Foundation.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations to Engage in Research for Racial Equity    

RTI's Transformative Research Unit for Equity's (TRUE) framework for equity-centered research and the Kellogg Foundation’s recent practice guides describe how engaging communities is a core practice of doing evaluation in service of racial equity. However, when we engage communities, researchers and evaluators tend to reap the benefits without much forethought given to the mutual benefits that could advantage communities and/or partners. Historically, unethical practices in research that minimize attention to social justice and community benefits have also led to distrust from communities of color, largely affecting their willingness to engage in research. This then begs the question: why would communities want to engage with research and what motivates them to continue engaging?

Generally, there are two orientations to motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.

• Intrinsic motivation: doing something for inherent satisfaction rather than a reward or consequence.
• Extrinsic motivation: doing something for the purpose of attaining some concrete outcome with instrumental value.

Both are equally important to consider when planning to engage community members in research because each one plays a role in driving behavior. If we want stronger engagements that can lead to partnerships with community members in the longer term, then we need to think about both types of motivations for incentives.

Our understanding of what motivates community members to engage with research leverages our practical experiences and empirical evidence based on community interviews asking what motivates participation. It’s also grounded in our principle to work on developing mutually beneficial partnerships that balance knowledge generation with community priorities and tangible benefits. We share some of those community perspectives with examples that can guide evaluations in service of racial equity.

Intrinsic Motivations: “because I am passionate about health equity.”

When we asked community members about their motivations to participate in research that was focused on health equity, many of them talked about a personal desire to serve that was fulfilling, especially if it meant advancing goals for equity and mitigating disparities in their community. For instance, community members in our research center were able to identify inconsistencies in the language that was used in our reports and in survey development. They were tired of hearing researchers talk about their community negatively. They advocated for asset-based language in our findings to challenge deficit-based narratives framed around their community. This shaped how we communicated about our research and informed how we engaged community members in co-designing products.

Thus, we have found that community members’ motivations to engage in research that is in service of advancing equity can be an extended connection to their values and passion for social justice. Communities are thinking about what is possible if they engage in this work and the mutual benefits for the communities that they in turn are connected to.  

Intrinsic motivations that promote meaningful engagement can also be embedded throughout the research process. For example, in a four-year long research project, our team prioritized building genuine relationships with community members. We made sure to open space to invite feedback about how we could work better together and what was needed to continue engaging community members in the work. Some of us were engaging with the community in other ways, like going to the farmer’s market or supporting community classes through volunteering. We were successful because community members valued our overall practice to come to the table listening first and our shared commitment to serve. Our intrinsic values were in alignment.

Community members hear and experience our investment in the community, and as a result we develop deep, trusting relationships. If researchers and evaluators can demonstrate a dedication and intention to build relationships with community members beyond transactional interactions bound by a research project, then community members may feel more encouraged to participate and engage with them long term. This is because there is a mutual investment in time and effort to form trust-based relationships.

RTI’s Equity Centered Framework principles for research practice require transformation of the researchers to engage inclusively by upending inherent biases and explicitly managing power dynamics so that at a minimum, the research or evaluation does no harm and ideally is strengthened by meaningful participation of community members. We believe that as researchers and evaluators, we can lead by example by seeking to develop respectful, mutually beneficial relationships with community members that reflect values of equity, diversity, inclusion, belonging, transformation, and liberation. This is not always simple.

Reconsidering Extrinsic Motivations: “to help the community and in the long term help myself”

When researchers and evaluators think about extrinsic motivations, we oftentimes consider how community participation can be motivated by compensation. But, if we shift our lens toward valuing community engagement with mutual benefits, we find other options that can be mutually beneficial and enticing. For example, we have used incentives that prioritize capacity building through professional development training for community members to qualitatively code interview data in collaboration with our research team. Here, community members were equipped to provide qualitative interpretations based on their expertise to ensure meaningfulness of our findings. This eventually led to multiple publications with shared authorship and an award, contributing to their career development.

Practicing evaluation in service of racial equity encourages researchers to extend beyond monetary incentives to focus on other benefits such as building skills or increasing knowledge, receiving technical support, and/or career development opportunities.

Community members are also more motivated to participate in research if they believe that their engagement will lead to concrete outcomes. In our project focused on health equity, we found that community members were motivated by the opportunity to potentially gain access to resources like data management systems or evidence-informed instruments. Some were motivated to generate something in partnership that leveraged both forms of expertise (from the researcher and community member) because it helped foster an outcome that was more meaningful and responsive to communities.

In a different project focused on collaborative networks of nonprofits, we offered community members the option to donate their monetary incentives to a nonprofit organization of their choice in their community. This is another example of a concrete outcome that showed exactly where community members’ contributions could go to motivate them to participate throughout the pandemic.

The common thread across all these experiences is that we made sure our incentives were meaningful and mutually beneficial for both the researchers/evaluators and community members to increase motivation to engage in our work. Researchers and evaluators should reconsider how extrinsic forms of incentives are designed and implemented.

We recommend shifting your focus to embed incentives to motivate community members that attend to values, mutual benefits, and capacity building for more meaningful participation of community members and continued engagement over time.

Doing Evaluations in Service of Racial Equity and Maintaining Relationships

As agents of social change, we must move our practices beyond the status quo. Meaningful engagement that focuses on trust and relationship building is key to community participation. But we also need to move away from the bounds of research to center equity. We need to focus on how the research or evaluation will not harm, but benefit communities. Our cost and benefit analyses when deciding to undertake a project should privilege community perspective if our work is to advance racial equity. How can we engage communities beyond grant funding and maintain those longer-term relationships? One consideration is to think about developing infrastructures that embed community participation as part of how systems normally function. For example, creating a community review board during the proposal phase to embed community members’ input on language and design. This establishes a standardized infrastructure that requires community relationships throughout the proposal development process.

We want to hear from you! How do you maintain longer term relationships? How do you know how long to keep investing in a relationship?