Researching alongside rural communities often garners vastly different outcomes between communities despite applying the same research methodology and considering the contextualized and nuanced nature of such projects. In this paper, we explore what might account for these differences through the lens of an education and career pathways project conducted in three Australian rural communities. The project drew on community-based participatory, collaborative research which supports the development of responsive community-researcher partnerships that can be adapted to community context. While the outcomes of any research project often appear to be an accident of timing and circumstance, in this paper we argue that community-researcher partnerships can be more deliberately targeted to take account of community context. We present a conceptual framework that considers particular characteristics of communities and the people within them, suggesting how community-researcher partnerships might be developed to help deliver more consistently effective outcomes that address 'real-life' issues in critical and transformative ways.