The developmental stages of a community-university partnership: the experience of Padres Informados/Jovenes Preparados.

BACKGROUND: Strong and sustained community-university partnerships are necessary for community-based participatory translational research. Little attention has been paid to understanding the trajectory of research partnerships from a developmental perspective.

OBJECTIVE: To propose a framework describing partnership development and maturation based on Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and describe how our collaboration is moving through those stages.

METHODS: Collaborators engaged in three rounds of iterative reflection regarding characteristics and contributors to the maturation of the Padres Informados/Jovenes Preparados (Informed Parents/Prepared Youth [PI/JP]) partnership.

LESSONS LEARNED: Each stage is characterized by broad developmental partnership tasks. Conflict or tension within the partnership is often a part of achieving the associated tasks. The strengths developed at each stage prepare the partnership for challenges associated with subsequent stages.

CONCLUSIONS: This framework could provide a means for partnerships to reflect on their strengths and challenges at a given time point, and to help understand why some partnerships fail whereas others achieve maturity.