Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
An HIV/AIDS clinical trials network maintains a local CAB at each research site, made up of community members and people living with HIV, which reviews draft informed-consent forms for clarity and cultural appropriateness before they are submitted to the IRB, and advises on recruitment messaging for the affected community.
- Is an instance
A university research center studying a chronic disease convenes a CAB of patients and caregivers that meets quarterly to advise investigators on which outcomes matter most to patients, informing protocol design before the study is finalized, and later helps the team plan a lay-language summary of results for participants.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) reviewing unblinded interim safety and efficacy data on a trial is not a CAB — its members are typically clinicians, statisticians, and bioethicists with authority to recommend that a trial be modified, paused, or stopped, not a community-input body.
- Not an instance
An Institutional Review Board (IRB) approving a study protocol is not a CAB — an IRB is a formally constituted regulatory body with legal authority to approve, require modifications to, or reject research involving human subjects; a CAB has no such approval authority.
Editorial commentary
A Community Advisory Board (CAB) is a standing group of community members, patient or participant representatives, and other local stakeholders convened to provide ongoing input into a research study or program from the perspective of the population most affected by it. CABs are advisory rather than regulatory: they do not approve, halt, or scientifically review research, but they shape how research is designed, conducted, and communicated so that it better reflects community priorities and concerns.
Origins in HIV/AIDS research
The CAB model is most closely associated with HIV/AIDS clinical research. In response to activism around access to and design of HIV trials, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) began establishing Community Advisory Boards in 1990 to give community input into trial network design and prioritization. NIAID-sponsored HIV/AIDS clinical trials networks continue to expect a local CAB at each participating site, with representatives feeding into national-level community constituency structures. The model has since spread well beyond HIV research into other areas of community-engaged and community-based participatory health research.
What a CAB typically does
A CAB’s remit generally covers the parts of a study where community perspective materially improves the research, including:
- Commenting on protocol acceptability and burden from a participant or community standpoint
- Reviewing informed-consent language for clarity, cultural appropriateness, and readability
- Advising on recruitment and retention strategies for the affected population
- Shaping messaging, outreach materials, and community communication about the study
- Helping plan the dissemination of results back to the community in accessible form
How a CAB differs from oversight bodies
Because the name suggests a review function, CABs are sometimes conflated with formal research-oversight bodies. The distinction matters for governance and disclosure purposes:
- Institutional Review Board (IRB): a regulatory body with legal authority to approve, require changes to, or reject a study on ethical and regulatory grounds. A CAB has no such approval authority; its input is advisory.
- Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB): a body of clinicians, statisticians, and ethicists that reviews unblinded interim safety and efficacy data and can recommend a trial be modified, paused, or stopped. A CAB does not review clinical data and has no stopping authority.
- Scientific Review Committee: evaluates the scientific merit and methodological rigor of a proposed study. A CAB does not assess scientific merit; it assesses community relevance and acceptability.
A CAB is complementary to, not a substitute for, these oversight structures — many funders and community-engaged research frameworks expect a study to have both formal ethical/scientific review and a CAB where the research directly affects an identifiable community.
Relationship to community-based participatory research
A CAB is one structural mechanism for putting the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) into practice: CBPR is the broader methodological approach of conducting research as an equitable partnership between researchers and the community throughout the research process, while a CAB is a specific advisory body a study or program can convene to operationalize that partnership. Not every study with a CAB is a full CBPR project, and not every CBPR project uses the specific CAB structure, but the two are closely related and frequently paired.
Why it matters for research administration
Some funders, IRBs, and community-engaged research frameworks increasingly expect documentation of community engagement mechanisms, including CABs, as part of study design, protocol review, or funding applications — particularly for research involving historically underserved or marginalized populations. Research administrators supporting such studies should be able to describe the CAB’s composition, meeting cadence, and role in the protocol, and distinguish it clearly from the IRB and any DSMB in study documentation.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Community Advisory Board (CAB)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/community-advisory-board-cab" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/community-advisory-board-cab",
"name": "Community Advisory Board (CAB)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/community-advisory-board-cab",
"description": "A Community Advisory Board (CAB) is a standing group of community members, patient/participant representatives, and other local stakeholders that provides ongoing, non-scientific input into the design, conduct, and dissemination of a research study or program from the perspective of the population it affects. A body qualifies as a CAB when it (1) is composed primarily of community members or affected-population representatives rather than research staff or clinicians, (2) advises on matters such as protocol acceptability, recruitment and retention strategies, informed-consent language, culturally appropriate messaging, and dissemination of results, and (3) operates on an advisory, non-binding basis — it does not have authority to approve, halt, or scientifically review the study. This distinguishes a CAB from bodies with formal regulatory or scientific-oversight authority, such as an Institutional Review Board (IRB), which reviews and approves research for ethical and regulatory compliance, or a Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB), which reviews accumulating safety and efficacy data during a trial. A CAB's role is community voice and engagement, not protocol approval or safety monitoring.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/clinical-research#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/community-advisory-board-cab",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"dateModified": "2026-07-17T18:13:39",
"inLanguage": "en"
}
