Engagement is Not an Option: The Essential Role of Community-Engaged Research for Implementation Science, in Community Violence Studies and Beyond

While community-engaged research would seem to have significant overlap with both implementation science and program and policy evaluation, these respective bodies of work have developed largely apart from one another. We argue that disregarding community-engaged epistemologies (or engaging only superficially) when studying how policy or programs “work” significantly increases the likelihood of producing invalid science. Accordingly, we present a case study of our work with a local community-based violence intervention operating in the Northeastern United States to demonstrate how principles of community-engaged research are essential to implementation and evaluation science work.