Attentiveness as a Methodological Approach for Including Community Partners in Qualitative Health Data Analysis

Health science funding agencies incentivize qualitative community-based research to promote inclusion and better address the health of historically exploited or excluded communities. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that such incentivizing may result in an exercise where minimal inclusion requirements are sought to expedite the research process while proper methods for community inclusion in qualitative health research are limited. Researchers may choose to recruit from vulnerable populations and include community representatives in advisory capacities but exclude the same vulnerable populations from participating in less convenient parts of the research process such as data analysis and interpretation. We argue that this is unethical as it undervalues community participation and serves to reify oppressive power structures that community-based participatory research (CBPR) strives to move away from. In this paper, we draw from feminist ethics and science and technology studies (STS) of care to introduce attentiveness as an analytic that modifies the relationships between researchers and community partners within all steps of research in ways that foreground community expertise and lived experience to produce transformative biomedical research based in health justice. First, we highlight the ethical rationales for community inclusion in qualitative data analysis through meaningful inclusion and epistemic justice, and provide researchers within CBPR normative grounding to support their methodological practice. Second, we describe attentiveness and demonstrate how inclusion within CBPR can be modified to generate novel ways of working with community partners during qualitative data analysis. Attentiveness thus bears significant epistemic potential in reworking longstanding qualitative research practices in CBPR that emphasize health justice.