[2] The historical roots of CBPR trace back to the development of participatory action research by Kurt Lewin and Orlando Fals Borda, and the popular education movement in Latin America associated with Paulo Freire.
These principles include: 1) acknowledging communities as "unities of identity", 2) building on existing community strengths and resources, 3) facilitating partnerships that are equitable, collaborative, empowering, and address social inequalities, 4) committing to co-learning and capacity building, 5) balancing knowledge generation and intervention to ensure mutual benefits for partners, 6) focusing on local issues of public concern, 7) utilizing a cyclical and repeatable process, 8) delivering results and knowledge to all partners, and 9) establishing sustainable, long-term partnerships with communities.
In the United States, EJ communities are characterized by residents who are people of color, low-income, non-native English speakers (linguistic isolation), or foreign born.
Due to their intersecting racial, national, and class identities, EJ communities have little control capacity and are the targets of negative externalities by polluting corporations.
By bettering communities' understandings of the problems they face, CBPR supports environmental literacy[7] and knowledge justice.
[9] The content areas include health,[10][11][12][13] ethnic studies,[14] bullying,[15] environmental justice,[6] and indigenous communities.
Some have taken what could be called a critical approach to this by emphasizing the "institutional power inequalities" in community-based organization-university relationship building.
[18] Scholars continue to problematize approaches that can engage instructors and students in imagining ways to work with communities.
Sociologists have entered the discussion from the point of view of the ethnographer or participant observer, where some have argued against "exoticizing the ghetto" or "cowboy ethnography".
Prevention, management, and awareness building about diabetes,[25] HIV/AIDS,[26] asthma,[27] cancer,[28] mental health, obesity,[29] and HPV vaccination[30] have been explored by CBPR studies.
Because of its community-based,[31][32] humanistic approach and public outreach potential, CBPR studies are commonly used with marginalized groups, such ethnic minorities and autistic people.