Inside Whole Communities–Whole Health’s Foundational Process Paper
In large research projects, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds — or worse, never map out a path through them. That’s why researchers from the Whole Communities–Whole Health (WCWH) team took an unusual but important step: They laid out exactly how the project has been built.
Published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) Formative Research, the paper, “Strategies to Implement a Community-Based, Longitudinal Cohort Study: The Whole Communities–Whole Health Case Study,” is what researchers call a “process paper.” Rather than focus on outcomes, it zeroes in on the implementation — the nuts and bolts of designing, launching and managing WCWH’s ambitious longitudinal cohort study.
“It was a big undertaking, but I’m really proud that we were able to get it published,” said Lindsay Bouchacourt, a research associate at UT’s Center for Health Communication (CHC) and lead author of the paper. “Process papers aren't that common, which is kind of shocking, because we learn so much as researchers [from] other people's research and how they've done something.”
The article was the brainchild of WCWH Research Coordinator Sarah Smith, who conceived the paper early in her tenure, building on early encouragement from former UT professor Darla Castelli, who, as co-chair at the time, championed the idea of a process paper from the start. With a background in public health and expertise in what’s known as implementation science, Smith was keenly aware of the importance of measuring and documenting everything from the start.
“A lot of researchers describe [research projects as] feeling like a train coming as you're putting the tracks down,” Smith said. “Our leadership team always emphasized to me that one of our key objectives was building a model for this type of research. And if you want to build a model, then documenting and measuring and evaluating everything that you're doing has to be a part of each phase, no matter how fast things are moving.”
“We want eyes on it. Maybe other researchers are interested in doing some kind of community-based longitudinal cohort study. This can act as a guide."
— Lindsay Bouchacourt, lead author
Still, the paper was years in the making. It started as a poster; the writing didn’t truly gain traction until Bouchacourt joined the project after completing her doctorate from Moody College’s Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations and joining WCWH Chair Mike Mackert at the CHC, where he serves as director. She then teamed up with Smith and took the lead in shaping the manuscript.
The result is a publication that they hope becomes a “foundational piece that we can then hopefully cite in future publications that we can then cite to WCWH,” Bouchacourt said. “The idea is that if faculty are writing a paper, they don't have to spend several pages explaining what WCWH is. You can just cite this paper.”
Yet Smith and Bouchacourt are quick to point out that this isn’t just internal documentation. By publishing the paper in an open-access journal, they aimed to make the paper useful for researchers beyond the Forty Acres. “I hope it helps inform other proposals,” Smith said. “I hope some of this can speak to capacity and preparation, because this was the learning curve for us. If somebody else is starting with that, I hope it gets built in earlier and put in place earlier, because that's a big goal with any process paper: learn from what we did, learn from our mistakes and what we have set up.”
“We want eyes on it,” Bouchacourt said. “Maybe other researchers are interested in doing some kind of community-based longitudinal cohort study. This can act a little bit as a guide: here are things we did, maybe things that didn’t work. Here are the aspects of the project that we think helped make WCWH unique and successful.”
Whole Communities, Wholly Unique
WCWH's distinctiveness is rooted in its design: a decade-long, cross-disciplinary process that follows families over time, emphasizing community engagement and returning meaningful data to participants. Those elements are more than mere buzzwords, Smith said — they’re backed by years of grassroots groundwork and relationship-building. “There’s a difference between stating that your project is interdisciplinary or community-based and actually doing what those things mean,” Smith said. “What we're trying to show is that there were three years of work done before this study even started. It’s a huge investment of time.”
This time allowed the team to prioritize trust-building and transparency with the study population based in and around Del Valle, in east Austin. One standout example is WCWH’s commitment to returning data to families in ways that are understandable and relevant.
“I really like the data return process,” Bouchacourt said. “I had not worked on a project previously that focuses on data return, and it’s such a big effort from a lot of people to get data back into the hands of participants in a way that makes sense. I think it does make this project really unique, and maybe other researchers who read this paper may feel inspired to do or attempt some kind of data return process with their projects.”
"This trust component and transparency, within our grand challenge of bridging science and society, can help establish trust again in research institutions and higher ed."
— Sarah Smith, co-author
For Smith, this approach isn’t just about data — it’s about redefining the researcher-participant relationship. “This trust component and transparency, within our grand challenge of bridging science and society, (can help) establish trust again in research institutions and higher ed,” she said. “Remembering that those worlds are not so separate, and ways to be on the same page and work with people, is going to be really important for research in the future in general.”
WCWH’s process model, Smith said, offers a tangible example of what it can look like to meet communities where they are and invite them in as true partners in research.
A ‘Living and Breathing’ Project
Bouchacourt and Smith both see the paper more as a blueprint than a tried-and-true guidebook. “This project really is living and breathing,” Bouchacourt said. “You have to nurture it and adjust it and make sure it’s viable and can continue living on.”
Smith elaborated: “If we didn’t have any model to measure what we were changing as we were changing it, then nobody’s going to listen to you, because they’re going to say, ‘Well, you changed your methods in year two — how am I supposed to rely on your data?’ But you can justify your change and then give more evidence as to why you, say, used this measure for this timeframe. Change will need to happen in a project; this paper shows the need to measure it.”
That’s the heart of a process paper: capturing the messy, iterative work of academic research — and sharing the lessons learned, so others don’t have to build the tracks from scratch.