Lessons Learned and Possibilities Recognized: An Academic-Community Partnership to Engage Multicultural Populations During a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed multiple disparities; racial and ethnic minority groups experienced higher proportions of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. However, racial and ethnic minority populations are often underrepresented in traditional survey research. In a survey of the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 in a local area, we developed three distinct academic-community partnerships. We report these partnerships with particular focus on the partnership that promoted the inclusion of racially and ethnically minoritized multicultural populations in the survey. We describe each stage of the partnership, including survey design, translation, outreach and recruitment, results, and dissemination of results, and share the lessons learned, both in terms of academic-community partnerships and in surveying multicultural populations. Our lessons learned consist of four main themes: Outreach and recruitment is more labor-intensive with multicultural populations; the respondents in the targeted sample for this study differed from the general population in how they experienced the effects of COVID-19; researchers must be flexible and plan for more time and expenses; and academic-community partnerships are a valuable model for including traditionally hard-to-reach populations in research. A comparison of our survey reach to that of its corresponding representative survey affirms that our process was effective in recruiting a population that differed from the representative sample, both in terms of demographics and the severity of the pandemic’s impact at the household level. Thus, additional efforts to reach multicultural and underrepresented populations are warranted, especially during a pandemic, and academic-community partnerships combine multiple areas of expertise to productively engage such populations.