Recovery Housing and On-the-Ground Research Priorities: A Scoping Study Through the Lens of Community Based Participatory Research

PATRICK F. HIBBARD ^1* Cameron W. Tice ² Jodie Dewey ¹ Kathryn Gallardo ³ James Tompkins ⁴ Justin S. Bell ¹ Jasleen Sandhu ⁵ Kathryn Babbitt ² Amy Mericle ⁶ Ashli Sheidow ¹

• ¹ Chestnut Health Systems, Bloomington, United States
• ² University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
• ³ University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, United States
• ⁴ California State University, Bakersfield, Bakersfield, California, United States
• ⁵ DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• ⁶ Alcohol Research Group, Emeryville, California, United States

Though communities have featured recovery housing (RH) for several decades, the base of evidence for best practices continues to grow -especially evidence needed by, and known to, those who operate and receive these services. The Initiative for Justice and Emerging Adult Populations (JEAP) engaged with three community boards (CBs)consisting of young adults with experience in recovery from substance use issues, people who have a history of criminal legal system involvement and recovery, and payers and provider of substance use services and harm reduction -using community-based participatory research to understand on-the-ground priorities for research into recovery support services. These efforts resulted in 12 overarching categories of research priorities, including RH. Each category contains a general problem statement, as well as testable research questions stemming from the priorities identified by the CBs. It remains to be seen, though, if research has answered them. This study used these research questions as the basis for an adapted scoping study, querying extant literature on these research priorities. Our search found 132 peer-reviewed studies of RH since 1984, 111 of these pertaining to the CB's research questions. These, however, were heavily weighted toward those providing fewer services and supervision (80%), and the research questions focused on RH operations (57%), though more recent efforts have investigated populations served (37%).