Navigating the Tide Together: Early Collaboration between Tribal and Academic Partners in a CBPR Study.

Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches stress the importance of building strong, cohesive collaborations between academic researchers and partnering communities; yet there is minimal research examining the actual quality of CBPR partnerships. The objective of the present paper is to describe and explore the quality of collaborative relationships across the first two years of the Healing of the Canoe project teams, comprised of researchers from the University of Washington and community partners from the Suquamish Tribe. Three quantitative/qualitative process measures were used to assess perceptions regarding collaborative processes and aspects of meeting effectiveness.