social work and participatory research

• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 12 April 2018

Understanding community-based participatory research through a social movement framework: a case study of the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project

• Marie-Claude Tremblay   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4965-2515 1 ,
• Debbie H. Martin 2 ,
• Alex M. McComber 3 , 4 ,
• Amelia McGregor 3 &
• Ann C. Macaulay 4  

BMC Public Health volume  18 , Article number:  487 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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A longstanding challenge of community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been to anchor evaluation and practice in a relevant theoretical framework of community change, which articulates specific and concrete evaluative benchmarks. Social movement theories provide a broad range of theoretical tools to understand and facilitate social change processes, such as those involved in CBPR. Social movement theories have the potential to provide a coherent representation of how mobilization and collective action is gradually developed and leads to systemic change in the context of CBPR. The current study builds on a social movement perspective to assess the processes and intermediate outcomes of a longstanding health promotion CBPR project with an Indigenous community, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KDSPP).

This research uses a case study design layered on a movement-building evaluation framework, which allows progress to be tracked over time. Data collection strategies included document (scientific and organizational) review ( n  = 51) and talking circles with four important community stakeholder groups ( n  = 24).

Findings provide an innovative and chronological perspective of the evolution of KSDPP as seen through a social movement lens, and identify intermediate outcomes associated with different dimensions of movement building achieved by the project over time (mobilization, leadership, vision and frames, alliance and partnerships, as well as advocacy and action strategies). It also points to areas of improvement for KSDPP in building its potential for action.

While this study’s results are directly relevant and applicable to the local context of KSDPP, they also highlight useful lessons and conclusions for the planning and evaluation of other long-standing and sustainable CBPR initiatives. The conceptual framework provides meaningful benchmarks to track evidence of progress in the context of CBPR. Findings from the study offer new ways of thinking about the evaluation of CBPR projects and their progress by drawing on frameworks that guide other forms of collective action.

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Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is an approach to research that involves collective, reflective and systematic inquiry in which researchers and community stakeholders engage as equal partners in all steps of the research process with the goals of educating, improving practice or bringing about social change [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. At its core, CBPR questions the power relationships that are inherently embedded in Western knowledge production, advocates for power to be shared between the researcher and the researched, acknowledges the legitimacy of experiential knowledge, and focuses on research aimed at improving situations and practices [ 3 ]. This approach to research is recognized as particularly useful when working with populations that experience marginalization – as is the case for some Indigenous communities—because it supports the establishment of respectful relationships with these groups, and the sharing of control over individual and group health and social conditions [ 3 , 4 ].

A longstanding challenge of CBPR has been to anchor evaluation and practice in a relevant and comprehensive theoretical framework of community change [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ]. Given the complex causal web linking CBPR projects to specific health outcomes, traditional measurement strategies may neither be sensitive enough nor adequate to assess change and document successes or failure at the community level [ 6 , 9 , 10 ]. In addition, our understanding of the processes that link community-based collaborative action to changes in systemic determinants of health outcomes is still limited [ 6 , 8 ]. To date, most evaluative frameworks of CBPR have focused on the internal characteristics of coalitions and partnerships [ 7 , 11 ], provided general guidance on implementation steps [ 8 , 12 ] or used logic models to map out desired outcome categories [ 13 ]. There is a need to articulate specific, concrete and sequential evaluation benchmarks for CBPR in a detailed and theoretically consistent framework [ 6 ].

Social movements, generally viewed as large group actions that promote social change [ 14 , 15 ], share a set of common features with CBPR, such as aiming to reverse unequal relations of power by creating broad social, policy and systemic changes [ 4 , 16 , 17 ]. The field of social movement research has produced a vast array of theoretical approaches, providing substantial theoretical tools to understand and facilitate collective action and social change [ 14 , 15 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. While many fields of research and action aimed at social betterment have been inspired by social movements [ 10 , 22 , 23 ], to our knowledge social movement theories have never been explicitly used to inform and better understand CBPR processes. We believe these theories can provide a coherent representation of how mobilization and collective action is gradually developed and leads to systemic change in the context of CBPR.

As a first step in assessing the relevance of social movement theories to understanding CBPR, we conducted a framework synthesis of illustrative CBPR projects (8) using a multidimensional social movement theory-based framework [ 24 ]. This synthesis, presented elsewhere [ 24 ], resulted in the development of a multidimensional framework through which to conceive and map community change processes in the context of CBPR. In addition, our synthesis demonstrated the relevance of using modern social movement theories, such as resource mobilization theory [ 15 , 20 , 25 , 26 ], political process theory [ 14 , 20 , 21 , 27 ] and framing theory [ 14 , 28 , 29 , 30 ], to understand and examine CBPR processes. More specifically, it demonstrated that CBPR projects, like social movements, can be envisioned as collective processes evolving dynamically and iteratively through a four-stage lifecycle: (1) emergence, (2) coalescence, (3) momentum, (4) maintenance, consolidation, integration or decline. Key elements of this four-stage process include capitalizing on resources, opportunities, and building partnership and collaboration among different organizations and entities. Just like a social movement, CBPR also makes strategic use of collective framing processes to define a representation of a social problem (cause), mobilize around the cause as well as to define a collective action strategy leading to system changes addressing the problem [ 24 ]. Here, we draw on the conclusions of our previous work to design and evaluate a specific CBPR project.

Purpose of the study

The goal of the current study is to assess the community-level processes and intermediate outcomes of a longstanding CBPR initiative developed with an Indigenous community, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KSDPP), using a social movement theory perspective. More specifically, this research builds on a movement-building evaluation framework to assess the general process underlying KSDPP as well as intermediate outcomes related to core movement-building concepts. In keeping with the purpose of most evaluative research, this study aims to provide results that are directly relevant and applicable to KSDPP, but also to highlight useful lessons for CBPR planning and evaluation more broadly.

Conceptual framework

There are a range of evaluative frameworks and benchmarks used to assess social movement building, advocacy efforts and policy-change action [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. Amongst them, Master and Osborn’s [ 31 ] comprehensive framework, which builds on a literature review of outcomes associated with social change, is particularly relevant for this study. Whereas many existing evaluative frameworks only provide end-of-project benchmarks, Master and Osborn’s framework provides a general perspective of how social movements can be conceived and allows for an meaningful exploration of movements’ development over time. This framework appeared particularly relevant to synthesize the most important concepts of social change.

Master and Osborn’s framework incorporates intermediate outcomes of five core components of movement building: base building and mobilization, leadership, vision, alliances, and advocacy infrastructure (Table  1 ). Each of these five components develop across four stages of movement building, facilitating a comprehensive and dynamic portrayal and assessment of a movement’s evolution over time. This comprehensive array of intermediate outcomes at different stages of a collective action process (distinct from impact outcomes related to a movement’s activities) are useful in the assessment of the development of a CBPR project over time.

The Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project

Kahnawake is a north-eastern Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community of 7859 residents (2017) that is situated on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, 10 miles from downtown Montreal (Quebec, Canada). The Kanien’kehá:ka are part of the Haudenosaunee, or “People of the Longhouse”, historically known as the Five Nations, or Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Traditional and cultural Haudenosaunee values emphasize collective thinking, shared responsibility, listening, taking into account the impact of current decisions on future generations, consensus decision-making, as well as a wholistic view of health, all of which provide a fertile ground for developing a CBPR project [ 34 ]. As a community, Kahnawake has demonstrated independence and autonomy in many domains, resulting in decentralization in the provision of a number of community services such as education, health, youth recreation programs for youth, and social services.

Despite this history of strength and independence, Kahnawake has been transformed by Western colonization, which has created social conditions that promote poorer food and lifestyle choices [ 35 ]. In 1985, two family physicians working in Kahnawake perceived high rates of Type 2 diabetes, and conducted a study to assess the prevalence of this condition in the community. Findings from the study showed that 12% of adults aged 45–64 had Type 2 diabetes, which was twice the rate of the general population [ 36 ]. Study findings also showed a high prevalence of diabetes related complications [ 37 , 38 ]. Based on these results, the physicians made a series of community presentations that raised awareness about diabetes, and shifted perceptions relating to the preventability of this disease [ 39 ]. Acting on this new awareness, community leaders mobilized and sought the expertise of academic researchers to develop a diabetes prevention program which became the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KSDPP), a CBPR project with a high degree of community involvement and ownership [ 40 , 41 , 42 ].

KSDPP aims to change the physical environment and social norms of the schools and community by promoting healthy eating and regular physical activity not only among children, but also parents, teachers, and all community members [ 43 , 44 ]. The project initially developed around a school-based component bolstered by community outreach interventions. The school-based component originally consisted of a health education curriculum delivered by teachers in Kahnawake elementary schools and a nutrition policy promoting healthy food choices at school. This policy was later expanded to include the promotion of physical activity and a whole range of healthy lifestyle activities. Community interventions include a variety of activities, many conducted in partnership with community organisations. The central goals of the community interventions are to create environments that support behavior change through activities tailored for parents, grand-parents and other community members [ 34 , 43 ]. While the program of activities is anchored in evidence-based theories of behavior and community change, the core of KSDPP’s actions are based on Kanien’kehá:ka values and traditions, and a wholistic view of health which incorporates the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions of life, true to a Haudenosaunee perspective of well-being [ 34 , 45 ]. For instance, the intervention’s primary target is elementary school children, which is consistent with the Kanien’kehá:ka value of taking responsibility to protect and promote the health of present and future generations (Seven Generations) [ 43 ]. The general approach of building supportive environments for health is in line with the Kanien’kehá:ka wholistic approach to education which takes into account the broader environment in which children develop [ 46 ]. In addition, KSDPP’s style of governance is deeply rooted in Kanien’kehá:ka values, which involve consensus in decision-making and a collective vision for the community [ 43 ].

Since the project’s inception, many studies have attempted to evaluate the impact of KSDPP on the health status and lifestyles of residents in the community. These studies have shown mixed results in the areas of physical activity, nutrition, weight and rates of diabetes [ 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 ]. The present study applies social movement concepts to expand and enrich this examination by identifying intermediate outcomes of KSDPP in the area of community mobilization and change, dimensions that are viewed as highly relevant and meaningful by KSDPP stakeholders. The goal of this research evaluation project was to develop a new understanding of KSDPP’s evolution, identify potential areas of improvement, and action paths for further mobilization of community workers and members around the issue of diabetes prevention. Results of the study were meant to inform the work of KSDPP and the greater Kahnawake community.

Research approach and design

We used a case study design, which is a systemic approach to qualitative research that allows the researcher to examine in depth the holistic nature of contemporary phenomena in natural contexts, with a multitude of data sources [ 52 , 53 ]. The case observed is the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KSDPP), bounded in time from its first ideation (around 1987) to present.

In accordance with KSDPP principles, this study builds on a community-based participatory approach, involving partnership building, regular exchange among partners, and experience sharing between the researchers, KSDPP intervention staff and the Community Advisory Board (CAB) [ 54 ]. This study uses an interpretivist perspective, which holds that reality is constructed through the meanings developed by social actors, including the investigators. Thus, findings emerged through dialogue and negotiation of interpretations between the researchers and stakeholders involved in this study.

In 2012, the first author approached KSDPP to explore their interested in the innovative idea of evaluating the community level processes and outcomes of KSDPP using social movement theories. As a result, the first author was invited to join the KSDPP research team as a postdoctoral investigator, attend monthly meetings of the CAB and the research team, and to engage in KSDPP activities and with the community of Kahnawake. As a settler, the first author did not have any previous research experience in partnership with an Indigenous community, and therefore sought to immerse herself in the culture and realities of the community. During her work, she was supervised by and benefited from the valuable advice, insight and knowledge of community leaders (AMG and AMC). The research proposal was designed and developed in full partnership with the KSDPP team to ensure cultural relevancy, and benefits for both KSDPP and the broader community. Stakeholders were involved in developing the research questions and methodology, as well as in data collection, the interpretation of findings and dissemination of results.

Data collection

Two data collection strategies were used in this case study (1) document review and (2) talking circles with four important stakeholder groups (data sources are described in Table  2 ).

Included in the review were documents that provided a comprehensive portrait of KSDPP’s evolution since 1994 in terms of key aspects of collective action such as leadership, community mobilization, KSDPP’s discourse and meta-narrative, alliance and partnerships, as well as program of activities. Documents reviewed were past and current KSDPP summaries of activity or work plans covering the years 1994 to 2016 ( n  = 12), as well as published scientific papers stemming from the project ( n  = 39). Organizational documents dating from before 2006 were only available in paper format and were digitized. Scientific publications that included KSDPP as one of a number of cases and published abstracts were discarded ( n  = 6), since these publications only provided shallow descriptions of KSDPP and redundant information. A list of all included publications is presented in Additional file  1 . Scientific and organizational documents were collected in January 2016 through direct solicitation, or downloaded from KSDPP and the research team websites ( ksdpp.org ; pram.mcgill.ca ) as well as a bibliographical database.

Talking circles are widely used to collect data in many Indigenous contexts, offering a means to collect data that encourages story-telling and collective listening – both important elements for sharing and gathering information within Indigenous contexts. Importantly, talking circles have been accepted by the Kahnawake community as a relevant data collection strategy. In a talking circle, participants sit in a circle and discuss specified topics until consensus is reached. An object (an eagle feather, a talking stick or a stone), is passed from one participant to another and the holder of the object has an opportunity to speak [ 55 ]. Talking circles were deemed useful in gathering stakeholder perceptions about the evolution of KSDPP, its collective action process and strategies, leadership, vision and partnerships. They also served to document the last stage of the project given the dearth of scientific publications after 2009. A talking circle guide, informed by the conceptual framework, was developed in partnership with the KSDPP team. This guide had questions about: (1) the importance of diabetes for the community; (2) the evolution of mobilization around diabetes in the community over the last 20 years; (3) community leaders (people or organizations) involved in diabetes prevention (4) perception of KSDPP and its impact over the last 20 years; (5) KSDPP’s vision (goal) (6) evolution of KSDPP’s action (7) community partners and collaborators of KSDPP; (8) strengths of KSDPP and actual challenges for diabetes prevention.

Participants involved in the study talking circles ( n  = 24) were also KSDPP stakeholders, i.e. individuals or groups with a vested interest in the focus of the evaluation or research [ 56 ]. They included: (1) KSDPP intervention staff and Community Advisory Board (CAB) members; (2) research team members; (3) community workers; (4) community members (see Table  2 for a full description). Recruitment of talking circle participants proceeded on a voluntary basis. Participants in the first two circles were recruited through a formal email invitation sent to current and past KSDPP staff members, CAB members and researchers, one month prior to the beginning of the study (the KSDPP team assisted in the creation of the lists). Participants in the remaining circles were recruited using general invitations mailed directly to a list of partner organizations created by the KSDPP team, announcements in the local newspaper, and direct solicitation of community members at community events, such as community walks.

In total, 5 talking circles were held between October and December 2015, each including 2 to 7 participants. In general, there was one talking circle for each stakeholder group, except the community worker group (group 3), which required 2 talking circles to fit the availability of participants. Talking circles were held in community facilities (community rooms and schools) over lunchtime to accommodate participants. Participants were provided with a light meal, which is a culturally appropriate manner in which to thank them for their participation. The average length of the talking circles, including the time spent explaining the study, was 2 h (range 1 h to 2 h 20 min). Talking circles provided a respectful and ordered structure through which to collect in-depth data, triangulate information, and build a common representation of events and times. Consensus was achieved when everyone felt that they could agree with the suggested statement. Following Kanien’kehá:ka decision making style, all participants came to ‘one mind’ as close as possible, all agreed to have a voice in the discussion.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

As with all KSDPP research projects, this project was conducted in accordance with the KSDPP Code of Research Ethics [ 57 ], which serves as a binding research agreement between the researchers and the community. Ethical approval was obtained first from the CAB and then from the McGill University ethics institutional review board. Participants in the talking circle provided individual written informed consent.

Data analysis

The analytic technique used in this study is framework analysis, a method for analysing primary data in applied social research that draws upon the work of Bryman and Burgess [ 58 ] and Miles and Huberman [ 59 ]. Framework analysis is useful for synthesizing knowledge from diverse sources [ 60 ]. This analysis technique typically involves five phases [ 61 ]: (1) familiarisation with the data; (2) identification of a relevant thematic framework; (3) application of the thematic framework by indexing all the data to specific themes; (4) organization of the data according to themes in a chart containing distilled summaries of views and experiences; (5) interpretation of findings, which involves mapping the range and nature of phenomena, creating typologies and finding association between themes.

Hard copies of publications (mostly organizational documents dated 2005 or earlier) were scanned and converted to PDF. All talking circles were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. To perform the analysis, a database including all sources of data (full-text scientific papers, organisational documents, and transcripts from the talking circles) was constructed using QSR NVivo 11 [ 62 ]. Using the framework analysis method, the first author immersed herself in the data, identifying key ideas (mobilization, leadership, goal and vision, collaboration and partnership, activities and strategies), and then searched the literature for a relevant thematic framework. Our work in this phase was informed by the results of a framework synthesis we conducted previously that demonstrated the relevance of modern social movement theories in the study of CBPR projects [ 24 ]. For the current study, we chose to use Master and Osborn’s movement-building framework, which provides a means to examine the development of various components of social movements over time. Based on Master and Osborn’s framework, the first author developed a coding grid and performed sentence by sentence coding to assign text to specific themes (components and stages). At this stage, we also added an inductive component building on thematic analysis to identify potential new themes from the data [ 59 ]. All coded material was organized in a chart presenting summaries of views and experiences for each theme, and facilitating a comprehensive interpretation of KSDPP process and intermediate outcomes in terms of movement building.

The first author conducted the majority of the analysis, but all provisional interpretations were discussed with the KSDPP research team, staff and CAB members. Two formal data interpretation sessions were held to discuss interpretations, add context to information collected, and facilitate a better understanding of project documentation. For instance, during these sessions participants built consensus on the start and end dates of each stage, as well as markers of change for each period (referred to as “benchmarks” in the framework). The resulting interpretation was therefore consensual and co-created by the different team members. Construct and internal validity of the study were ensured by triangulation of data sources and methods, member checking, and the in-depth involvement of the researcher in the field. Finally, reliability of the study was improved by the development and use of a case study protocol and the development of database and a chain of evidence [ 52 ].

Results show an innovative and chronological perspective of KSDPP’s evolution as seen through a social movement lens, as well as intermediate outcomes associated with different dimensions of movement building achieved by this project over time. The inductive component of the analysis suggests new benchmarks pertaining to some movement-building components (bolded in the table). The dates proposed for each stage are approximate and should be understood as temporal benchmarks, as phases often overlap.

The next section outlines the different stages of KSDPP in narrative style, describing the important benchmarks reached, which are summarized in Table  3 .

The emergence of KSDPP: from early 1987 to mid-1997

The first stage of KSDPP, which we call emergence, began in 1987 when community leaders first evoked the idea of developing an intervention to prevent type 2 diabetes in Kahnawake [ 39 ].

The first stage emerged following a shift in the perception of diabetes following a lengthy community awareness-building process implemented from the mid- to late-1980s [ 39 , 43 ]. During this process, baseline research results were shared with the community shifting the perception of diabetes from being a personal issue to a community issue. The idea that diabetes could be prevented was slowly articulated in the late 1980s and early 1990s [ 39 ].

Volunteer community leaders, including elders and family physicians who raised the alarm about diabetes, invited academic researchers with expertise in community research to join the effort of elaborating a project proposal and developing a partnership [ 43 ]. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the team secured national research and intervention funding in 1994, and formally initiated the project [ 41 ]. One of the early exercises of the team consisted in elaborating operating guidelines and conditions for the participatory research process underlying KSDPP through a Code of Ethics [ 43 , 57 ]. “The process of creating a KSDPP partnership involving community researchers, academic researchers, and the community has been facilitated and strengthened by the joint development of a Code of Research Ethics during the first year of the project” [ 41 ].

The underlying philosophy of KSDPP (a participatory research process) was easily implemented because it converged with a Kanien’kehá:ka tradition of consensus decision-making [ 43 ]. At the same time, the partners also defined an inspirational and shared vision for Kahnawake that portrayed a community free of diabetes, living healthily and in wholistic balance. This vision, which laid the ground for the elaboration of strategic goals, was framed according to important cultural values of the Kanien’kehá:ka, such as a collective concern for the welfare of future generations (Seven Generations) and a wholistic philosophy of health [ 34 ]. As mentioned by one talking circle participant, in the first stage of KSDPP, collective reflection around the project, its goals and processes was highly important and helped set the stage for future steps:

“It took a year, a year and a half to prepare things once we had the grant. I remember saying things like ‘We need to do things, it takes time that we are out there. If we want to have an effect, we need to do things’. So we did such things as developing a code [of research ethics], a vision, developing all those kinds of things that take a lot of time, take a lot of discussion of participatory nature (…). I think that the way we did things put a very solid foundation; that what is sustained there, this kind of vision, this kind of relationship, the code of research ethics, and those kinds of things are traceable through those times.” (group 2)

KSDPP developed from a partnership that was initially formed through an alliance of professionals from the Kahnawake Education Centre, the Kateri Memorial Hospital Centre and Kahnawake Shakotiia’takehnhas Community Services (social family services), as well as researchers from McGill University and Université de Montréal. A talking circle participant (group 1) discussed the importance KSDPP’s roots in community: “I think that the grassroots connection that KSDPP has from the beginning is a very important strength. It’s the people from the community that… we, people in the community who are associated with KSDPP”. Over the first three years, the partnership recruited around 40 volunteers from multiple local organizations who formed the KSDPP Community Advisory Board (CAB) [ 43 ]. This CAB was (and is still) responsible for supervising all aspects of the project, from the design of the intervention through implementation and assessment. Through this new structure, “partnerships among local health, education, recreation, and community service organisations were formed, enhancing community participation” [ 41 ] as well as collaborative leadership.

In the first years of program implementation (1994–1997), the intervention team was staffed by two full-time community members, selected for their leadership and their role as agents for change [ 43 ]. As evoked by a talking circle participant (group 3), the choice of these persons was strategic, because they “came from the education system, so not only they were from the community but they were teachers so everyone knows them in that circle”. These staff members participated in formal training activities in order to acquire new skills in health promotion or enhance their competencies [ 41 ]. The program also provided many opportunities for collaborators to acquire new competencies. For instance, KSDPP supported the implementation of a new health curriculum in the elementary schools. While the curriculum was created by nurses and a nutritionist it was developed to be delivered by teachers (as opposed to health care professionals) who assumed full responsibility for the program in 1997 [ 46 ].

Coalescence of KSDPP: from mid-1997 to 2000

Beginning in August 1997, KSDPP experienced a series of events prompting the partnership to reinforce, take shape and deepen its ties in the community.

As the initial 3-year intervention and research grant was coming to an end in mid-1997, KSDPP began to seek new sources of support [ 41 ]. In June 1997, community partners (the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, Kahnawake Shakotiia’takehnhas Community Services, and the Kahnawake Education Center) provided funds to enable the project to continue for one year (1997–1998) (funding was for the intervention component of KSDPP) [ 63 ]. These new funding partners, who were essentially new constituencies, were fully committed to the project. For talking circle participants (group 1), the fact that community partners provided funds for KSDPP to continue is an indicator of the value given to KSDPP by community stakeholders, who “were highly mobilized by the cause and pooled resources”. Following the year of community funding, continuing funds were secured from external private foundations (1999–2001).

Already at this stage, the participatory decision-making process and collaborative governance of the project were well established. In fact, study findings for that period point to a participatory democracy or non-hierarchical decision-making process as the primary mode of KSDPP governance [ 42 , 64 ]. For instance, it was reported that “The influence of multiple partners in determining the overall direction of KSDPP demonstrates the responsiveness and accountability of the egalitarian leadership style promoted by project staff” (p. 184) [ 64 ]. In addition, in one of the talking circles (group 3), a participant from a community organization and former CAB member described the way KSDPP invited partners to join the CAB, emphasizing the leadership style that KSDPP put in place:

“(KSDPP) went up there, spoke and invited people to come and sit on the Community [Advisory] Board… [this] was a place where your ideas were acceptable. Like you had to be the ones to write the terms of reference, you had to be the one for this mission, (...) it was always like a corporate thing.”

KSDPP’s coalescence was characterized by the translation of KSDPP’s vision into a full and workable action strategy that builds on, and integrates traditional and cultural values: “Activity implementation was embedded within an overall program intervention cycle directed towards promoting living in balance, in turn, a reflection of local cultural values” [ 34 ]. Living in balance, which “reflects being well in mind, body, emotion, and spirit” [ 34 ] is congruent with the Haudenosaunee wholistic approach of health [ 34 , 46 ]. By 1997, the team had established the core intervention activities and had experience implementing activities in the community [ 65 ]. Through collaboration community partners leveraged and optimized resources, shared responsibilities and supported each other’s efforts [ 65 ]. At that time, the partnership broadened to other community partners (such as teachers teaching the new curriculum in 1997) [ 46 ] thereby extending awareness and commitment to the cause of KSDPP (talking circle, groups 1): “At that time, teachers began to be more comfortable with the new curriculum, and were very committed to the cause”.

An analysis of programming approaches implemented in 1996–1997 reveals that half of the activities were conducted by KSDPP independently whereas half resulted from collaborative partnerships with community organizations [ 65 ]. Interestingly, this analysis “found that more than two thirds of collaborations occurred in response to invitations received by KSDPP from other community entities” [ 65 ]. In these collaborations, community members and organisations “brought their knowledge of the community, and contributed ideas on how best to carry out the activities in which they were involved” [ 41 ]. According to talking circle participants (group 1), trust and respect characterized the relationship with the education system at that time.

KSDPP’s moment: from 2001 to 2006

Based on its experience in the second stage, KSDPP developed into a stronger organization in the third stage, with well-established partnerships in the community, a well-oiled program of activities and significant community and political recognition. During this period, KSDPP became a leader in Canada for addressing diabetes prevention among First Nations communities [ 50 ].

In 2001, KSDPP secured major funding for 5 years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), permitting the hire of an additional 4 people (including a public relations officer) and the development of the KSDPP Center for Research and Training in Diabetes Prevention [ 43 , 66 , 67 ]. This grant, which acknowledged KSDPP’s experience, expertise and leadership in diabetes prevention and community mobilization, allowed the organization to further community mobilization within Kahnawake, while developing a community mobilization training program to disseminate its intervention model to over 30 Indigenous communities across Canada (from 2001 to 2014) [ 68 ]. Inside its own community, KSDPP also reached a high level of credibility owing to its participatory approach, as emphasized by some participants: “I think [that] a lot of the development of KSDPP was done alongside community members so it taught us to have credibility in community” (group 1). “The other organizations within the community have come around recognizing the central role that KSDPP can play in [health promotion and diabetes prevention]” (group 2). At that time, “KSDPP’s visibility in and acceptance by the community suggests that it is perceived as an accessible community resource for health promotion” [ 65 ].

During this stage KSDPP’s leaders acquired external recognition from public institutions. For example, in 1999, a KSDPP staff member who was also a community researcher was elected to the Board of Directors of the Canadian National Aboriginal Diabetes Association (NADA), serving as vice-chairperson until 2002 and eventually chairperson from 2002 to 2004. In the years 1999–2001, a physician-researcher deeply involved in KSDPP’s formation and work was elected president of the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG). She was key in the development of a new policy promoting participatory research in this international organization. In 2010, KSDPP received a Partnership Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for their exemplary work [ 69 ]. Even if not specific to the third stage, this award recognized the strength of KSDPP’s work in these times, as well as its contribution to developing ethical agreements with Indigenous communities.

From 2001 to 2006, with funding from the CIHR and the National Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative (Health Canada), KSDPP became active on many levels and continued to extend its reach and vision [ 41 , 70 ]. As indicated in a scientific article describing KSDPP over this period, “this programme has grown, it has sustained itself and enriched itself in interaction with the community (…)” [ 41 ]. KSDPP’s staff disseminated information about the program locally, nationally and internationally by participating in national forums addressing diabetes and health issues for Indigenous people [ 41 ]. Inside the community, a KSDPP public relationship office was created to actively disseminate KSDPP’s news through radio shows, newsletters and other means of communication [ 70 ] (talking circle, group 1). In 2000, the local Onkwata’karitáhtshera Health and Social Service Research Council was created by the community health board to act as the community ethics board for all health and social research conducted in Kahnawake. This entity acknowledged KSDPP’s CAB as a valid and autonomous ethics authority to evaluate proposals for diabetes prevention research, and added KSDPP’s Code of Research Ethics to its original research agreement terms (talking circles, groups 1 and 2).

At that time, most activities of KSDPP were already collaborative in nature [ 34 ], capitalizing on a core of partner organizations that have “taken KSDPP to work together more or less systematically” (talking circle – group 2). They also developed new partnerships with organizations in the private sector of the community, including a local computer software company [ 66 ]. Collaborating with new partners allowed “the creation and production of new activities and activity tools (e.g., diabetes awareness booth, cooking demonstrations with students)” [ 34 ]. Respect among partners has allowed the program to consistently evolve: “Because each partner’s voice was heard and respected, constructive negotiation occurred allowing transformations in the programme in a way that did not threaten its identity” [ 41 ].

KSDPP’s momentum was characterized by the full achievement of its collective action strategy, building on a core program of activities that achieved maturity with the addition of other activity components. A paper describing KSDPP at this period emphasizes that the project “evolved by increasing both the reach and intensity of healthy living interventions” [ 43 ]. In addition to the core activities, KSDPP’s program expanded to include preschool children and also engaged adolescents in youth empowerment projects through the community high school [ 66 ]. By 2003, there were more than 100 different interventions per year, many in partnership with other community organizations [ 66 ]. A descriptive case study of KSDPP at this period highlights that: “There is continuous momentum in active participation of community members involved in diverse activities ranging from research to supporting interventions” [ 66 ].

KSDPP’s maintenance, integration and consolidation: from 2007 to present

The current stage of KSDPP can be characterized by the emergence of a new form of leadership, resource constraints, lower levels of community mobilization and sensitiveness to KSDPP’s message, as paradoxically KSDPP’s vision and goals have become more integrated inside the community and within the agendas and priorities of partner organisations.

Major decreases in funding since 2006 have resulted in the majority of the staff, including the public relations position, retiring from the project. This made it difficult for KSDPP to keep the momentum going in mobilizing the community, as explained by a participant: “(…) To me, [KSDPP brought] very positive changes, but then I guess because of decreased funding and decreased staff, the momentum didn’t keep going” (group 3). According to talking circle participants (group 1), the administrative environment in the community became less supportive of KSDPP activity. Decreases in resources, coupled with a lack of innovation, rendered KSDPP less visible. This phenomenon was highlighted by some community participants (group 4): “When it was very popular, like in the first years… the people knew about it, they were active in schools… Some people didn’t like some of the ideas they were bringing, but it was more known and now it’s very quiet, we don’t hear about it anymore”. An hypothesis evoked is that KSDPP’s action became so integrated into the community that it appeared less noticeable to community members. One participant (group 1) mentioned that “[KSDPP] has become part of the social fabric in the community”, which is, paradoxically, a form of success.

The current stage is characterized by the rise of a new generation of leaders in different parts of the partnership, including the KSDPP research team and KSDPP intervention staff. From a research team perspective, since 2006 the research team has been involved in smaller research projects (many led by postgraduate students, under the supervision of the KSDPP research team) and has included new determinants of diabetes prevention (i.e. food security, adequate sleep) (talking circle, group 2). From a staff perspective, this era is also seen as a turbulent one, with high levels of staff turnover and hiring based on programmatic activity and the availability of funding. New staff members have brought a fresh perspective on the KSDPP collective action strategy and vision, providing renewed energy, all the while ensuring continuity in KSDPP’s overall work (talking circle, group 1). As explained by one participant (group 3): “There have been many different people, different staff over the years, but I see now there are a few new young [people] who work for KSDPP and I see the exact same strength. It’s the way that they’re part of the community and the way that they go and mobilize all their contacts within the community”.

During this stage, the vision promoted by KSDPP (a healthy community, free of diabetes) and the norm underlying this vision (diabetes is a preventable disease) appeared as successfully disseminated in the community. Some participants described this shift in beliefs and norms: “There was a whole change (...), this idea of diabetes being preventable has now become the normal way of thinking…”(group 1). “I remember (...) people coming in and teaching you different things about eating healthier and being healthier and being active, it was sort of like new to us. And now it’s like normal for all the kids to have a nutrition policy in the schools” (group 4). Talking circle participants involved directly in KSDPP (group 1 and 2) were unambiguous about the role the project played in promoting this vision: “KSDPP certainly played the role of that catalyst [for diabetes prevention] in the community” (group 1). “KSDPP was the catalyst to the whole movement. They were the ones that caused this whole spark and this whole awareness and this [desire] to do something about it and the energy that just infiltrated the whole community” (group 2). However, the vision is still not shared by everyone in the community, with some interpreting KSDPP’s message and efforts to implement it as a form of policing: “(…) [some community organizations] have sodas and junk food and things like that in their vending machines. And again, it’s that response ‘It’s our choice to do that” (talking circle, group 1). “I think that there’s part of the population that think that health promotion and diabetes prevention is important but there’s a part of the population that don’t wanna hear about it” (talking circle, group 4).

Regarding the issue of collaboration, KSDPP has allowed many partners to build capacity, and these partners are now taking over some of the responsibilities initially held by KSDPP. For instance, a Masters student research project led to the development and implementation of a physical activity policy in the elementary schools (2011–2013) and a PhD student project conducted in collaboration with a multi-sectorial committee contributed to the development of an active school transportation project (2013–2015). These projects involved representatives of partner organizations, who are now assuming the leadership of these initiatives [ 71 , 72 ]. A staff member mentioned: “It’s intentionally with everything KSDPP does… we’re working this way, we’re putting ourselves in with everyone else, intentionally trying to mobilize people to take ownership of these issues for themselves” (group 1).

KSDPP’s continuous action has resulted in the integration of its collective action agenda, i.e. fostering healthy eating and physical activity, in some partnering organisations. For instance, the physical activity policy (2011–2013) was developed in close collaboration with the community elementary schools [ 73 ]. Participants emphasized the pervasiveness of KSDPP’s agenda on partner organisations: “People have talked about the importance of the wellness policies in the schools and I have a very strong feeling that those would never ever have happened in the early years of KSDPP” (group 2). “KSDPP as a separate entity is able to challenge either the utility of that direction or to explore other areas that perhaps the organisations aren’t focusing on at the moment” (group 1). However, participants (group 1) recognize that there is still resistance from some sectors of the community and some participants (group 2) highlighted the need to build stronger collaborations with some health organizations in the community to get funding instead of competing with each other.

New proposed benchmarks

Findings from the study point to potentially new benchmarks in the examination and assessment of the development of KSDPP (bolded in Table  3 ). For instance, in the third stage, a recurrent theme in the “vision and frames” component was broader dissemination of the KSDPP vision and approach across levels of implementation (i.e. local, national and international). This phenomenon has been emphasized both in KSDPP publications over this period, and by KSDPP stakeholders in the talking circles. We therefore propose that broadening dissemination of a project’s vision might be a significant benchmark at this stage. Using the same rationale, additional benchmarks are proposed for stage 3 (Alliances, partnerships, networks; Advocacy agenda and action strategy) and stage 4 (Base building and mobilization; Alliances, partnerships, networks).

KSDPP’s areas of potential improvement

By comparing the actions and processes of KSDPP to the chosen theoretical framework, this analysis has exposed potential areas of improvement for the initiative.

First, and as emphasized by participants, is the question of continuing leadership: “Looking ahead, [one thing to do] is nurturing the torch bearers for health promotion, diabetes prevention. I don’t know if we have enough of those still generated from KSDPP (…) We served our term and beyond (…) and there needs to be more.” (group 2). Even if some evidence shows a renewing of the research and intervention leadership in KSDPP, there is still some room to plan and foresee the future of the partnership leadership, which is essential in avoiding stagnation or dissipation in a movement. Such an exercise could involve “creating time for intellectual and spiritual reflection by leaders as well as a commitment to training a new generation of leadership” [ 74 ].

Second is the need to continuously review and redefine the partnership’s vision and strategies. For instance, one talking circle participant (group 1) suggested broadening the vision and collective action strategy to focus more generally on wellness: “I think one area that we have talked about is the area of wellness in general (…). I think KSDPP started where it was safe, around physical activity and healthy eating (...) we’ve already started to work with stress, mental health and wellness. So is this an area that KSDPP will develop more fully in the future?” Along similar lines, some participants (groups 3 and 4) suggested finding more efficient strategies to ingrain healthy behaviours in children, such as more systematic and direct engagement with parents: “I think sometimes where we miss the mark is that it was aimed primarily at the schools, but it’s the parents who are the role models, it’s the parents who are making the purchases of the food in the home and maybe sometimes there should be more emphasis put on the parents than on the children” (group 3). As suggested by some participants (group 2), renewing KSDPP strategies may also require scaling up or developing further alliances with the political and economic sectors of the community so as to tackle political and systemic determinants of diabetes prevention and health promotion that can’t be addressed by KSDPP alone:

“Something that we talked about (...) is working with the economic sector of the community on health promotion. (...) Because if we look at the people that are selling food, are providing food services, we know that they are supplying demand; the community is demanding salt, fat, sugar, carbs, etcetera. We want them to shift to something else but we always backed off from them.”

The end of this study coincided with KSDPP’S strategic planning exercise (“strategic conversations” with key community actors and members). The first author was invited to participate in the design of these conversations and integrated the results of this study, including potential area of improvement and action paths, in this reflection.

This framework analysis, based on a social movement-building framework [ 31 ], portrays the development of KSDPP in a four-stage process of emergence, coalescence, momentum and maintenance/integration; each stage assessed by the achievement of intermediate outcomes, and influenced at different levels and by different kinds of resources, and mobilization, partnership and collective action activities. Based on the framework benchmarks, we conclude that KSDPP has reached the last stage of movement-building, which is the maintenance and integration stage into the Kahnawake community.

Based on this analysis, we can see that KSDPP’s overall reach has expanded from its original vision which was focused on diabetes prevention. Framing KSDPP as a social movement, this study points to other significant processes and outcomes, such as creating awareness; shifting norms and beliefs about diabetes in the community; fostering community mobilization, collaboration and leadership around this issue; building community capacity, skills and expertise in diabetes prevention; creating culture of collaboration and resource sharing among community organizations and permeating the diabetes prevention agenda into other organizations. Previous studies that have looked at KSDPP’s outcomes have tended to provide a mixed picture of the project’s impact on health and the behaviors of residents. One could say that the design of these studies may have failed to capture events and trends in the broader context that influence people’s behaviors and health, such as the introduction of satellite television in the community in 2008, the increasing availability of fast-food restaurants over the last 20 years, as well as strong positive secular trends in the prevalence of obesity [ 47 ]. We believe that studies with an exclusive focus on health outcomes pose paradoxes to the very nature of CBPR, which is based on the ecological premise that “an individual’s behavior is shaped by a dynamic interaction with the social environment” [ 6 ]. In addition, community-level changes and processes in their own constitute valuable outcomes, and they sometimes have a “more profound impact on well-being than did the intended outcomes of planned interventions” [ 5 ]. Our study highlights important community-level processes and outcomes in Kahnawake, which can be considered as transitional steps towards health improvement.

A movement-building framework such as that by Masters and Osborn [ 31 ] is an applicable and innovative tool with which to understand and assess CBPR projects. Although the movement-building framework has been applied retrospectively in the current study, it can be used prospectively to encourage ongoing reflection and assessment in the context of CBPR [ 31 ]. Using the framework retrospectively can help coalitions situate and assess themselves with respect to the collective action they led and the progress made over the years. Using the framework prospectively can assist coalitions plan ahead by providing general guidance about aspects of the action that are important at a specific moment. While the phases of the framework are modeled on social movement development stages, they nonetheless provide useful markers to assess the development and progress of CBPR projects and other collective action strategies over time, Furthermore, the core concepts of movement-building (i.e. base building and mobilization; leadership; vision and frames; alliances, partnerships, networks; advocacy agenda and action strategy) resonate with the CBPR approach and allow an identification and examination of core CBPR processes and action. Moreover, the benchmarks associated with each phase help identify key accomplishments at each stage as well as areas where additional efforts need to be focused. For instance, it suggests that in the second stage (coalescence) of development, CBPR teams should not expect to pervade the agendas of collaborating organizations, but should rather focus on refining collective action goals; in addition, CBPR leaders should not expect to be recognized from the base, but rather should work at building and expanding core collaboration.

However, while the framework offers a number of distinct intermediate goals on which to focus, it does not provide strategies with which to achieve these goals, which might be a limitation to translating findings into implementation. For example, in the third stage (movement’s moment) of implementation the movement/CBPR project is supposed to see “public support of the meta-narratives increase”, but the framework doesn’t specify how to achieve this benchmark; it only offers examples of trackable progress.

We believe that social movement frameworks, such as the one used in this study, apply particularly well to long-standing, sustainable community-based projects. However, it is important to acknowledge that these frameworks may not be useful or relevant to all CBPR projects. In the case of KSDPP, the specificities of Kahnawake and the Mohawk culture favored the emergence of this form of large, sustainable community-based projects – one that is similar to social movements.

The current study assessed the processes and intermediate outcomes of the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project using a social movement building framework. This framework analysis describes the development of KSDPP’s in a four-stage process, each stage defined and described by the achievement of important intermediate outcomes and the identification of potential areas of improvement. The framework’s central concepts provide useful markers to situate long-standing and sustainable CBPR projects within its own life course, and inform the development of recommendations to provide guidance for future action. This study proposes some innovative insights regarding the evaluation of CBPR projects and the assessment of their progress by building on their similarities with other forms of collective action.

Abbreviations

Community Advisory Board

• Community-based participatory research

Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project

National Aboriginal Diabetes Association

North American Primary Care Research Group

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Acknowledgements

MCT gratefully thanks the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project and the community of Kahnawake for their support and their contribution to this project. Special thanks are owed to Judi Jacobs (KSDPP general manager), who provided a helpful support with data collection logistics and community research review. The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of Selma Chipenda-Dansokho, who carefully reviewed the manuscript for English.

MCT was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Research in First Nations, Métis and/or Inuit Health (302299).

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the KSDPP research agreement, but are available from KSDPP on reasonable request ([email protected]). KSDPP retains ownership of all data, and control over data and their use is managed by the KSDPP Community Advisory Board. Scientific publications analyzed in this study is presented in Additional file  1 .

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Marie-Claude Tremblay

School of Health and Human Performance, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Debbie H. Martin

Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, Kahnawake, QC, Canada

Alex M. McComber & Amelia McGregor

Department of Family Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

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This research has been first designed and developed by the principal author (MCT) in collaboration with co-authors (AM, DH, AMC) and KSDPP. MCT mainly collected the data and carried out the first analysis. Results have been interpreted and discussed by all authors (MCT, AM, DH, AMC, AMG). MCT wrote a first version of the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marie-Claude Tremblay .

Ethics declarations

As with all KSDPP research projects, this project has been conducted in accordance with the KSDPP Code of Research Ethics ( http://www.ksdpp.org/elder/code_ethics.php ), which serves as a binding research agreement between the researcher and the community. Full ethical approval was obtained first from the Community Advisory Board of KSDPP and then from the McGill University ethics institutional review board (project A11-B52-14A). Participants in the talking circle provided individual written informed consent.

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Additional file

Additional file 1:.

List of scientific and organisational documents included in the document review (n = 51). (DOCX 25 kb)

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Tremblay, MC., Martin, D.H., McComber, A.M. et al. Understanding community-based participatory research through a social movement framework: a case study of the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project. BMC Public Health 18 , 487 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5412-y

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• Published: 27 April 2023

Participatory action research

• Flora Cornish   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3404-9385 1 ,
• Nancy Breton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8388-0458 1 ,
• Ulises Moreno-Tabarez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3504-8624 2 ,
• Jenna Delgado 3 ,
• Mohi Rua 4 ,
• Ama de-Graft Aikins 5 &
• Darrin Hodgetts 6  

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume  3 , Article number:  34 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research to generate new knowledge. This Primer sets out key considerations for the design of a PAR project. The core of the Primer introduces six building blocks for PAR project design: building relationships; establishing working practices; establishing a common understanding of the issue; observing, gathering and generating materials; collaborative analysis; and planning and taking action. We discuss key challenges faced by PAR projects, namely, mismatches with institutional research infrastructure; risks of co-option; power inequalities; and the decentralizing of control. To counter such challenges, PAR researchers may build PAR-friendly networks of people and infrastructures; cultivate a critical community to hold them to account; use critical reflexivity; redistribute powers; and learn to trust the process. PAR’s societal contribution and methodological development, we argue, can best be advanced by engaging with contemporary social movements that demand the redressingl of inequities and the recognition of situated expertise.

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Introduction.

For the authors of this Primer, participatory action research (PAR) is a scholar–activist research approach that brings together community members, activists and scholars to co-create knowledge and social change in tandem 1 , 2 . PAR is a collaborative, iterative, often open-ended and unpredictable endeavour, which prioritizes the expertise of those experiencing a social issue and uses systematic research methodologies to generate new insights. Relationships are central. PAR typically involves collaboration between a  community with lived experience of a social issue and professional researchers, often based in universities, who contribute relevant knowledge, skills, resources and networks. PAR is not a research process driven by the imperative to generate knowledge for scientific progress, or knowledge for knowledge’s sake; it is a process for generating knowledge-for-action and knowledge-through-action, in service of goals of specific communities. The position of a PAR scholar is not easy and is constantly tested, as PAR projects and roles straddle university and community boundaries, involving unequal  power relations and multiple, sometimes conflicting interests. This Primer aims to support researchers in preparing a PAR project, by providing a scaffold to navigate the processes through which PAR can help us to collaboratively envisage and enact emancipatory futures.

We consider PAR an emancipatory form of scholarship 1 . Emancipatory scholarship is driven by interest in tackling injustices and building futures supportive of human thriving, rather than objectivity and neutrality. It uses research not primarily to communicate with academic experts but to inform grassroots collective action. Many users of PAR aspire to projects of liberation and/or transformation . Users are likely to be critical of research that perpetuates oppressive power relations, whether within the research relationships themselves or in a project’s messages or outcomes, often aiming to trouble or transform power relations. PAR projects are usually concerned with developments not only in knowledge but also in action and in participants’ capacities, capabilities and performances.

PAR does not follow a set research design or particular methodology, but constitutes a strategic rallying point for collaborative, impactful, contextually situated and inclusive efforts to document, interpret and address complex systemic problems 3 . The development of PAR is a product of intellectual and activist work bridging universities and communities, with separate genealogies in several Indigenous 4 , 5 , Latin American 6 , 7 , Indian 8 , African 9 , Black feminist 10 , 11 and Euro-American 12 , 13 traditions.

PAR, as an authoritative form of enquiry, became established during the 1970s and 1980s in the context of anti-colonial movements in the Global South. As anti-colonial movements worked to overthrow territorial and economic domination, they also strived to overthrow symbolic and epistemic injustices , ousting the authority of Western science to author knowledge about dominated peoples 4 , 14 . For Indigenous scholars, the development of PAR approaches often comprised an extension of Indigenous traditions of knowledge production that value inclusion and community engagement, while enabling explicit engagements with matters of power, domination and representation 15 . At the same time, exchanges between Latin American and Indian popular education movements produced Orlando Fals Borda’s articulation of PAR as a paradigm in the 1980s. This orientation prioritized people’s participation in producing knowledge, instead of the positioning of local populations as the subject of knowledge production practices imposed by outside experts 16 . Meanwhile, PAR appealed to those inspired by Black and postcolonial feminists who challenged established knowledge hierarchies, arguing for the wisdom of people marginalized by centres of power, who, in the process of survivance, that is, surviving and resisting oppressive social structures, came to know and deconstruct those structures acutely 17 , 18 .

Some Euro-American approaches to PAR are less transformational and more reformist, in the action research paradigm, as developed by Kurt Lewin 19 to enhance organizational efficacy during and after World War II. Action research later gained currency as a popular approach for professionals such as teachers and nurses to develop their own practices, and it tended to focus on relatively small-scale adjustments within a given institutional structure, instead of challenging power relations as in anti-colonial PAR 13 , 20 . In the late twentieth century, participatory research gained currency in academic fields such as participatory development 21 , 22 , participatory health promotion 23 and creative methods 24 . Although participatory research includes participants in the conceptualization, design and conduct of a project, it may not prioritize action and social change to the extent that PAR does. In the early twenty-first century, the development of PAR is occurring through sustained scholarly engagements in anti-colonial 5 , 25 , abolitionist 26 , anti-racist 27 , 28 , gender-expansive 29 , climate activist 30 and other radical social movements.

This Primer bridges these traditions by looking across them for mutual learning but avoiding assimilating them. We hope that readers will bring their own activist and intellectual heritages to inform their use of PAR and adapt and adjust the suggestions we present to meet their needs.

Four key principles

Drawing across its diverse origins, we characterize PAR by four key principles. The first is the authority of direct experience. PAR values the expertise generated through experience, claiming that those who have been marginalized or harmed by current social relations have deep experiential knowledge of those systems and deserve to own and lead initiatives to change them 3 , 5 , 17 , 18 . The second is knowledge in action. Following the tradition of action research, it is through learning from the experience of making changes that PAR generates new knowledge 13 . The third key principle is research as a transformative process. For PAR, the research process is as important as the outcomes; projects aim to create empowering relationships and environments within the research process itself 31 . The final key principle is collaboration through dialogue. PAR’s power comes from harnessing the diverse sets of expertise and capacities of its collaborators through critical dialogues 7 , 8 , 32 .

Because PAR is often unfamiliar, misconstrued or mistrusted by dominant scientific 33 institutions, PAR practitioners may find themselves drawn into competitions and debates set on others’ terms, or into projects interested in securing communities’ participation but not their emancipation. Engaging communities and participants in participatory exercises for the primary purpose of advancing research aims prioritized by a university or others is not, we contend, PAR. We encourage PAR teams to articulate their intellectual and political heritage and aspirations, and agree their core principles, to which they can hold themselves accountable. Such agreements can serve as anchors for decision-making or counterweights to the pull towards inegalitarian or extractive research practices.

Aims of the Primer

The contents of the Primer are shaped by the authors’ commitment to emancipatory, engaged scholarship, and their own experience of PAR, stemming from their scholar-activism with marginalized communities to tackle issues including state neglect, impoverishment, infectious and non-communicable disease epidemics, homelessness, sexual violence, eviction, pollution, dispossession and post-disaster recovery. Collectively, our understanding of PAR is rooted in Indigenous, Black feminist and emancipatory education traditions and diverse personal experiences of privilege and marginalization across dimensions of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability. We use an inclusive understanding of PAR, to include engaging, emancipatory work that does not necessarily use the term PAR, and we aim to showcase some of the diversity of scholar-activism around the globe. The contents of this Primer are suggestions and reflections based on our own experience of PAR and of teaching research methodology. There are multiple ways of conceptualizing and conducting a PAR project. As context-sensitive social change processes, every project will pose new challenges.

This Primer is addressed primarily to university-based PAR researchers, who are likely to work in collaboration with members of communities or organizations or with activists, and are accountable to academic audiences as well as to community audiences. Much expertise in PAR originates outside universities, in community groups and organizations, from whom scholars have much to learn. The Primer aims to familiarize scholars new to PAR and others who may benefit with PAR’s key principles, decision points, practices, challenges, dilemmas, optimizations, limitations and work-arounds. Readers will be able to use our framework of ‘building blocks’ as a guide to designing their projects. We aim to support critical thinking about the challenges of PAR to enable readers to problem-solve independently. The Primer aims to inspire with examples, which we intersperse throughout. To illustrate some of the variety of positive achievements of PAR projects, Box  1 presents three examples.

Box 1 What does participatory action research do?

The Tsui Anaa Project 60 in Accra, Ghana, began as a series of interviews about diabetes experiences in one of Accra’s oldest indigenous communities, Ga Mashie. Over a 12-year period, a team of interdisciplinary researchers expanded the project to a multi-method engagement with a wide range of community members. University and community co-researchers worked to diagnose the burden of chronic conditions, to develop psychosocial interventions for cardiovascular and associated conditions and to critically reflect on long-term goals. A health support group of people living with diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, called Jamestown Health Club (JTHC), was formed, met monthly and contributed as patient advocates to community, city and national non-communicable disease policy. The project has supported graduate collaborators with mixed methods training, community engagement and postgraduate theses advancing the core project purposes.

Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 were approached by members of the Katkari tribal community in Maharashtra, India, who were concerned about landlords erecting fences around their villages. Using their institutional networks, the academics investigated the villagers’ legal rights to secure tenure and facilitated a series of participatory investigations, through which Katkari villagers developed their own understanding of the inequalities they faced and analysed potential action strategies. Subsequently, through legal challenges, engagement with local politics and emboldened local communities, more than 100 Katkari communities were more secure and better organized 5 years later.

The Morris Justice Project 74 in New York, USA, sought to address stop-and-frisk policing in a neighbourhood local to the City University of New York, where a predominantly Black population was subject to disproportionate and aggressive policing. Local residents surveyed their neighbours to gather evidence on experiences of stop and frisk, compiling their statistics and experiences and sharing them with the local community on the sidewalk, projecting their findings onto public buildings and joining a coalition ‘Communities United for Police Reform’, which successfully campaigned for changes to the city’s policing laws.

Experimentation

This section sets out the core considerations for designing a PAR project.

Owing to the intricacies of working within complex human systems in real time, PAR practitioners do not follow a highly proceduralized or linear set of steps 34 . In a cyclical process, teams work together to come to an initial definition of their social problem, design a suitable action, observe and gather information on the results, and then analyse and reflect on the action and its impact, in order to learn, modify their understanding and inform the next iteration of the research–action cycle 3 , 35 (Fig.  1 ). Teams remain open throughout the cycle to repeating or revising earlier steps in response to developments in the field. The fundamental process of building relationships occurs throughout the cycles. These spiral diagrams orient readers towards the central interdependence of processes of participation, action and research and the nonlinear, iterative process of learning by doing 3 , 36 .

Participatory action research develops through a series of cycles, with relationship building as a constant practice. Cycles of research text adapted from ref. 81 , and figure adapted with permission from ref. 82 , SAGE.

Building blocks for PAR research design

We present six building blocks to set out the key design considerations for conducting a PAR project. Each PAR team may address these building blocks in different ways and with different priorities. Table  1 proposes potential questions and indicative goals that are possible markers of progress for each building block. They are not prescriptive or exhaustive but may be a useful starting point, with examples, to prompt new PAR teams’ planning.

Building relationships

‘Relationships first, research second’ is our key principle for PAR project design 37 . Collaborative relationships usually extend beyond a particular PAR project, and it is rare that one PAR project finalizes a desired change. A researcher parachuting in and out may be able to complete a research article, with community cooperation, but will not be able to see through the hard graft of a programme of participatory research towards social change. Hence, individual PAR projects are often nested in long-term collaborations. Such collaborations are strengthened by institutional backing in the form of sustainable staff appointments, formal recognition of the value of university–community partnerships and provision of administrative support. In such a supportive context, opportunities can be created for achievable shorter-term projects to which collaborators or temporary researchers may contribute. The first step of PAR is sometimes described as the entry, but we term this foundational step building relationships to emphasize the longer-term nature of these relationships and their constitutive role throughout a project. PAR scholars may need to work hard with and against their institutions to protect those relationships, monitoring potential collaborations for community benefit rather than knowledge and resource extraction. Trustworthy relationships depend upon scholars being aware, open and honest about their own interests and perspectives.

The motivation for a PAR project may come from university-based or community-based researchers. When university researchers already have a relationship with marginalized communities, they may be approached by community leaders initiating a collaboration 38 , 39 . Alternatively, a university-based researcher may reach out to representatives of communities facing evident problems, to explore common interests and the potential for collaboration 40 . As Indigenous scholars have articulated, communities that have been treated as the subjects or passive objects of research, commodified for the scientific knowledge of distant elites, are suspicious of research and researchers 4 , 41 . Scholars need to be able to satisfy communities’ key questions: Who are you? Why should we trust you? What is in it for our community? Qualifications, scholarly achievements or verbal reassurances are less relevant in this context than past or present valued contributions, participation in a heritage of transformational action or evidence of solidarity with a community’s causes. Being vouched for by a respected community member or collaborator can be invaluable.

Without prior relationships one can start cold, as a stranger, perhaps attending public events, informal meeting places or identifying organizations in which the topic is of interest, and introducing oneself. Strong collaborative relationships are based on mutual trust, which must be earned. It is important to be transparent about our interests and to resist the temptation to over-promise. Good PAR practitioners do not raise unrealistic expectations. Box  2 presents key soft skills for PAR researchers.

Positionality is crucial to PAR relationships. A university-based researcher’s positionalities (including, for example, their gender, race, ethnicity, class, politics, skills, age, life stage, life experiences, assumptions about the problem, experience in research, activism and relationship to the topic) interact with the positionalities of community co-researchers, shaping the collective definition of the problem and appropriate solutions. Positionalities are not fixed, but can be changing, multiple and even contradictory 42 . We have framed categories of university-based and community-based researchers here, but in practice these positionings of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are often more complex and shifting 43 . Consideration of diversity is important when building a team to avoid  tokenism . For example, identifying which perspectives are included initially and why, and whether members of the team or gatekeepers have privileged access owing to their race, ethnicity, class, gender and/or able-bodiedness.

The centring of community expertise in PAR does not mean that a community is ‘taken for granted’. Communities are sites of the production of similarity and difference, equality and inequalities, and politics. Knowledge that has the status of common sense may itself reproduce inequalities or perpetuate harm. Relatedly, strong PAR projects cultivate  reflexivity 44 among both university-based and community-based researchers, to enable a critical engagement with the diversity of points of view, positions of power and stakes in a project. Developing reflexivity may be uncomfortable and challenging, and good PAR projects create a supportive culture for processing such discomfort. Supplementary files  1 and   2 present example exercises that build critical reflexivity.

Box 2 Soft skills of a participatory action researcher

Respect for others’ knowledge and the expertise of experience

Humility and genuine kindness

Ability to be comfortable with discomfort

Sharing power; ceding control

Trusting the process

Acceptance of uncertainty and tensions

Openness to learning from collaborators

Self-awareness and the ability to listen and be confronted

Willingness to take responsibility and to be held accountable

Confidence to identify and challenge power relations

Establishing working practices

Partnerships bring together people with different sets of norms, assumptions, interests, resources, time frames and working practices, all nested in institutional structures and infrastructures that cement those assumptions. University-based researchers often take their own working practices for granted, but partnership working calls for negotiation. Academics often work with very extended time frames for analysis, writing and review before publication, hoping to contribute to gradually shifting agendas, discourses and politics 45 . The urgency of problems that face a community often calls for faster responsiveness. Research and management practices that are normal in a university may not be accessible to people historically marginalized through dimensions that include disability, language, racialization, gender, literacy practices and their intersections 46 . Disrupting historically entrenched power dynamics associated with these concerns can raise discomfort and calls for skilful negotiation. In short, partnership working is a complex art, calling for thoughtful design of joint working practices and a willingness to invest the necessary time.

Making working practices and areas of tension explicit is one useful starting point. Not all issues need to be fully set out and decided at the outset of a project. A foundation of trust, through building relationships in building block 1, allows work to move ahead without every element being pinned down in advance. Supplementary file  1 presents an exercise designed to build working relationships and communicative practices.

Establishing a common understanding of the issue

Co-researchers identify a common issue or problem to address. University-based researchers tend to justify the selection of the research topic with reference to a literature review, whereas in PAR, the topic must be a priority for the community. Problem definition is a key step for PAR teams, where problem does not necessarily mean something negative or a deficit, but refers to the identification of an important issue at stake for a community. The definition of a problem, however, is not always self-evident, and producing a problem definition can be a valid outcome of PAR. In the example of risks of eviction from Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 (Box  1 ), a small number of Katkari people first experienced the problem in terms of landlords erecting barbed wire fences. Other villages did not perceive the risk of eviction as a big problem compared with their other needs. Facilitating dialogues across villages about their felt problems revealed how land tenure was at the root of several issues, thus mobilizing interest. Problem definitions are political; they imply some forms of action and not others. Discussion and reflexivity about the problem definition are crucial. Compared with other methodologies, the PAR research process is much more public from the outset, and so practices of making key steps explicit, shareable, communicable and negotiable are essential. Supplementary file  3 introduces two participatory tools for collective problem definition.

Consideration of who should be involved in problem definition is important. It may be enough that a small project team works closely together at this stage. Alternatively, group or public meetings may be held, with careful facilitation 5 . Out of dialogue, a PAR team aims to agree on an actionable problem definition, responding to the team’s combination of skills, capacities and priorities. A PAR scholar works across the university–community boundary and thus is accountable to both university values and grassroots communities’ values. PAR scholars should not deny or hide the multiple demands of the role because communities with experience of marginalization are attuned to being manipulated. Surfacing interests and constraints and discussing these reflexively is often a better strategy. Creativity may be required to design projects that meet both academic goals (such as when a project is funded to produce certain outcomes) and the community’s goals.

For example, in the context of a PAR project with residents of a public housing neighbourhood scheduled for demolition and redevelopment, Thurber and colleagues 47 describe how they overcame differences between resident and academic researchers regarding the purposes of their initial survey. The academic team members preferred the data to be anonymous, to maximize the scientific legitimacy of their project (considered valuable for their credibility to policymakers), whereas the resident team wanted to use the opportunity to recruit residents to their cause, by collecting contact details. The team discussed their different objectives and produced the solution of two-person survey teams, one person gathering anonymous data for the research and a second person gathering contact details for the campaign’s contact list.

Articulating research questions is an early milestone. PAR questions prioritize community concerns, so they may differ from academic-driven research questions. For example, Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 facilitated a participatory process that developed questions along the lines of: What are the impacts of not having a land title for Katkari people? How will stakeholders respond to Katkari organizing, and what steps can Katkari communities take towards the goal of securing tenure? In another case, incarcerated women in New York state, USA, invited university academics to evaluate a local college in prison in the interest of building an empirical argument for the value of educational opportunities in prisons 38 , 48 Like other evaluations, it asked: “What is the impact of college on women in prison?” But instead of looking narrowly at the impact on re-offending as the relevant impact (as prioritized by politicians and policymakers), based on the incarcerated women’s advice, the evaluation tracked other outcomes: women’s well-being within the prison; their relationships with each other and the staff; their children; their sense of achievement; and their agency in their lives after incarceration.

As a PAR project develops, the problem definition and research questions are often refined through the iterative cycles. This evolution does not undermine the value of writing problem definitions and research questions in the early stages, as a collaboration benefits from having a common reference point to build from and from which to negotiate.

Observing, gathering and generating materials

With a common understanding of the problem, PAR teams design ways of observing the details and workings of this problem. PAR is not prescriptive about the methods used to gather or generate observations. Projects often use qualitative methods, such as storytelling, interviewing or ethnography, or participatory methods, such as body mapping, problem trees, guided walks, timelines, diaries, participatory photography and video or participatory theatre. Gathering quantitative data is an option, particularly in the tradition of participatory statistics 49 . Chilisa 5 distinguishes sources of spatial data, time-related data, social data and technical data. The selected methods should be engaging to the community and the co-researchers, suited to answering the research questions and supported by available professional skills. Means of recording the process or products, and of storing those records, need to be agreed, as well as ethical principles. Developing community members’ research skills for data collection and analysis can be a valued contribution to a PAR project, potentially generating longer-term capacities for local research and change-making 50 .

Our selection of data generation methods and their details depends upon the questions we ask. In some cases, methods to explore problem definitions and then to brainstorm potential actions, their risks and benefits will be useful (Supplementary file  3 ). Others may be less prescriptive about problems and solutions, seeking to explore experience in an open-ended way, as a basis for generating new understandings (see Supplementary file  2 for an example reflective participatory exercise).

Less-experienced practitioners may take a naive approach to PAR, which assumes that knowledge should emerge solely from an authentic community devoid of outside ideas. More established PAR researchers, however, work consciously to combine and exchange skills and knowledge through dialogue. Together with communities, we want to produce effective products, and we recognize that doing so may require specific skills. In Marzi’s 51 participatory video project with migrant women in Colombia, she engaged professional film-makers to provide the women with training in filming, editing and professional film production vocabulary. The women were given the role of directors, with the decision-making power over what to include and exclude in their film. In a Photovoice project with Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto, Canada, Tuck and Habtom 25 drew on their prior scholar–activist experience and their critical analysis of scholarship of marginalization, which often uses tropes of victimhood, passivity and sadness. Instead of repeating narratives of damage, they intended to encourage desire-based narratives. They supported their young participants to critically consider which photographs they wanted to include or exclude from public representations. Training participants to be expert users of research techniques does not devalue their existing expertise and skills, but takes seriously their role in co-producing valid, critical knowledge. University-based researchers equally benefit from training in facilitation methods, team development and the history and context of the community.

Data generation is relational, mediated by the positionalities of the researchers involved. As such, researchers position themselves across boundaries, and need to have, or to develop, skills in interpreting across boundaries. In the Tsui Anaa Project (Box  1 ) in Ghana, the project recruited Ga-speaking graduate students as researchers; Ga is the language most widely spoken in the community. The students were recruited not only for their language skills, but also for their Ga cultural sensibilities, reflected in their sense of humour and their intergenerational communicative styles, enabling fluid communication and mutual understanding with the community. In turn, two community representatives were recruited as advocates to represent patient perspectives across university and community boundaries.

University-based researchers trained in methodological rigour may need reminders that the process of a PAR project is as important as the outcome, and is part of the outcome. Facilitation skills are the most crucial skills for PAR practitioners at this stage. Productive facilitation skills encourage open conversation and collective understandings of the problem at hand and how to address it. More specifically, good facilitation requires a sensitivity to the ongoing and competing social context, such as power relations, within the group to help shift power imbalances and enable participation by all 52 . Box  3 presents a PAR project that exemplifies the importance of relationship building in a community arts project.

Box 3 Case study of the BRIDGE Project: relationship building and collective art making as social change

The BRIDGE Project was a 3-week long mosaic-making and dialogue programme for youth aged 14–18 years, in Southern California. For several summers, the project brought together students from different campuses to discuss inclusion, bullying and community. The goal was to help build enduring relationships among young people who otherwise would not have met or interacted, thereby mitigating the racial tensions that existed in their local high schools.

Youth were taught how to make broken tile mosaic artworks, facilitated through community-building exercises. After the first days, as relationships grew, so did the riskiness of the discussion topics. Youth explored ideas and beliefs that contribute to one’s individual sense of identity, followed by discussion of wider social identities around race, class, sex, gender, class, sexual orientation and finally their identities in relationship to others.

The art-making process was structured in a manner that mirrored the building of their relationships. Youth learned mosaic-making skills while creating individual pieces. They were discouraged from collaborating with anyone else until after the individual pieces were completed and they had achieved some proficiency. When discussions transitioned to focus on the relationship their identities had to each other, the facilitators assisted them in creating collaborative mosaics with small groups.

Staff facilitation modelled the relationship-building goal of the project. The collaborative art making was built upon the rule that no one could make any changes without asking for and receiving permission from the person or people who had placed the piece (or pieces) down. To encourage participants to engage with each other it was vital that they each felt comfortable to voice their opinions while simultaneously learning how to be accountable to their collaborators and respectful of others’ relationships to the art making.

The process culminated in the collective creation of a tile mosaic wall mural, which is permanently installed in the host site.

Collaborative analysis

In PAR projects, data collection and analysis are not typically isolated to different phases of research. Instead, a tried and tested approach to collaborative analysis 53 is to use generated data as a basis for reflection on commonalities, patterns, differences, underlying causes or potentials on an ongoing basis. For instance, body mapping, photography, or video projects often proceed through a series of workshops, with small-scale training–data collection–data analysis cycles in each workshop. Participants gather or produce materials in response to a prompt, and then come together to critically discuss the meaning of their productions.

Simultaneously, or later, a more formal data analysis may be employed, using established social science analytical tools such as grounded theory, thematic, content or discourse analysis, or other forms of visual or ethnographic analysis, with options for facilitated co-researcher involvement. The selection of a specific orientation or approach to analysis is often a low priority for community-based co-researchers. It may be appropriate for university-based researchers to take the lead on comprehensive analysis and the derivation of initial messages. Fine and Torre 29 describe the university-based researchers producing a “best bad draft” so that there is something on the table to react to and discuss. Given the multiple iterations of participants’ expressions of experiences and analyses by this stage, the university-based researchers should be in a position that their best bad draft is grounded in a good understanding of local perspectives and should not appear outlandish, one-sided or an imposition of outside ideas.

For the results and recommendations to reflect community interests, it is important to incorporate a step whereby community representatives can critically examine and contribute to emerging findings and core messages for the public, stakeholders or academic audiences.

Planning and taking action

Taking action is an integral part of a PAR process. What counts as action and change is different for each PAR project. Actions could be targeted at a wide range of scales and different stakeholders, with differing intended outcomes. Valid intended outcomes include creating supportive networks to share resources through mutual aid; empowering participants through sharing experiences and making sense of them collectively; using the emotional impact of artistic works to influence policymakers and journalists; mobilizing collective action to build community power; forging a coalition with other activist and advocacy groups; and many others. Selection between the options depends on underlying priorities, values, theories of how social change happens and, crucially, feasibility.

Articulating a theory of change is one way to demonstrate how we intend to bring about changes through designing an action plan. A theory of change identifies an action and a mechanism, directed at producing outcomes, for a target group, in a context. This device has often been used in donor-driven health and development contexts in a rather prescriptive way, but PAR teams can adapt the tool as a scaffolding for being explicit about action plans and as a basis for further discussions and development of those plans. Many health and development organizations (such as Better Evaluation ) have frameworks to help design a theory of change.

Alternatively, a community action plan 5 can serve as a tangible roadmap to produce change, by setting out objectives, strategies, timeline, key actors, required resources and the monitoring and evaluation framework.

Social change is not easy, and existing social systems benefit, some at the expense of others, and are maintained by power relations. In planning for action, analysis of the power relations at stake, the beneficiaries of existing systems and their potential resistance to change is crucial. It is often wise to assess various options for actions, their potential benefits, risks and ways of mitigating those risks. Sometimes a group may collectively decide to settle for relatively secure, and less-risky, small wins but with the building of sufficient power, a group may take on a bigger challenge 54 .

Ethical considerations are fundamental to every aspect of PAR. They include standard research ethics considerations traditionally addressed by research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs), including key principles of avoidance of harm, anonymity and confidentiality, and voluntary informed consent, although these issues may become much more complex than traditionally presented, when working within a PAR framework 55 . PAR studies typically benefit from IRBs that can engage with the relational specificities of a case, with a flexible and iterative approach to research design with communities, instead of being beholden to very strict and narrow procedures. Wilson and colleagues 56 provide a comprehensive review of ethical challenges in PAR.

Beyond procedural research ethics perspectives, relational ethics are important to PAR projects and raise crucial questions regarding the purpose and conduct of knowledge production and application 37 , 57 , 58 . Relational ethics encourage an emphasis on inclusive practices, dialogue, mutual respect and care, collective decision-making and collaborative action 57 . Questions posed by Indigenous scholars seeking to decolonize Western knowledge production practices are pertinent to a relational ethics approach 4 , 28 . These include: Who designs and manages the research process? Whose purposes does the research serve? Whose worldviews are reproduced? Who decides what counts as knowledge? Why is this knowledge produced? Who benefits from this knowledge? Who determines which aspects of the research will be written up, disseminated and used, and how? Addressing such questions requires scholars to attend to the ethical practices of cultivating trusting and reciprocal relationships with participants and ensuring that the organizations, communities and persons involved co-govern and benefit from the project.

Reflecting on the ethics of her PAR project with young undocumented students in the USA, Cahill 55 highlights some of the intensely complex ethical issues of representation that arose and that will face many related projects. Determining what should be shared with which audiences is intensely political and ethical. Cahill’s team considered editing out stories of dropping out to avoid feeding negative stereotypes. They confronted the dilemma of framing a critique of a discriminatory educational system, while simultaneously advocating that this flawed system should include undocumented students. They faced another common dilemma of how to stay true to their structural analysis of the sources of harms, while engaging decision-makers invested in the current status quo. These complex ethical–political issues arise in different forms in many PAR projects. No answer can be prescribed, but scholar–activists can prepare themselves by reading past case studies and being open to challenging debates with co-researchers.

The knowledge built by PAR is explicitly knowledge-for-action, informed by the relational ethical considerations of who and what the knowledge is for. PAR builds both  local knowledge and conceptual knowledge. As a first step, PAR can help us to reflect locally, collectively, on our circumstances, priorities, diverse identities, causes of problems and potential routes to tackle them.

Such local knowledge might be represented in the form of statistical findings from a community survey, analyses of participants’ verbal or visual data, or analyses of workshop discussions. Findings may include elements such as an articulation of the status quo of a community issue; a participatory analysis of root causes and/or actionable elements of the problem; a power analysis of stakeholders; asset mapping; assessment of local needs and priorities. Analysis goes beyond the surface problems, to identify underlying roots of problems to inform potential lines of action.

Simultaneously, PAR also advances more global conceptual knowledge. As liberation theorists have noted, developments in societal understandings of inequalities, marginalization and liberation are often led by those battling such processes daily. For example, the young Black and Indigenous participants working with Tuck and Habtom 25 in Toronto, Canada, engaged as co-theorists in their project about the significance of social movements to young people and their post-secondary school futures. Through their photography project, they expressed how place, and its history, particularly histories of settler colonialism, matters in cities — against a more standard view that treated the urban as somehow interchangeable, modern or neutral. The authors argue for altered conceptions of urban and urban education scholarly literatures, in response to this youth-led knowledge.

A key skill in the art of PAR is in creating achievable actions by choosing a project that is engaging and ambitious with achievable elements, even where structures are resistant to change. PAR projects can produce actions across a wide range of scales (from ‘small, local’ to ‘large, structural’) and across different temporal scales. Some PAR projects are part of decades-long programmes. Within those programmes, an individual PAR project, taking place over 12 or 24 months, might make one small step in the process towards long-term change.

For example, an educational project with young people living in communities vulnerable to flooding in Brazil developed a portfolio of actions, including a seminar, a native seeds fair, support to an individual family affected by a landslide, a campaign for a safe environment for a children’s pre-school, a tree nursery at school and influencing the city’s mayor to extend the environmental project to all schools in the area 30 .

Often the ideal scenario is that such actions lead to material changes in the power of a community. Over the course of a 5-year journey, the Katkari community (Box  1 ) worked with PAR researchers to build community power to resist eviction. The community team compiled households’ proof of residence; documented the history of land use and housing; engaged local government about their situations and plans; and participated more actively in village life to cultivate support 39 . The university-based researchers collected land deeds and taught sessions on land rights, local government and how to acquire formal papers. They opened conversations with the local government on legal, ethical and practical issues. Collectively, their legal knowledge and groundwork gave them confidence to remove fencing erected by landlords and to take legal action to regularize their land rights, ultimately leading to 70 applications being made for formal village sites. This comprised a tangible change in the power relation between landlords and the communities. Even here, however, the authors do not simply celebrate their achievements, but recognize that power struggles are ongoing, landlords would continue to aggressively pursue their interests, and, thus, their achievements were provisional and would require vigilance and continued action.

Most crucially, PAR projects aim to develop university-based and community-based researchers’ collective agency, by building their capacities for collaboration, analysis and action. More specifically, collaborators develop multiple transferable skills, which include skills in conducting research, operating technology, designing outputs, leadership, facilitation, budgeting, networking and public speaking 31 , 59 , 60 .

University-based researchers build their own key capacities through exercising and developing skills, including those for collaboration, facilitation, public engagement and impact. Strong PAR projects may build capacities within the university to sustain long-term relationships with community projects, such as modified and improved infrastructures that work well with PAR modalities, appreciation of the value of long-term sustained reciprocal relations and personal and organizational relationships with communities outside the university.

Applications

PAR disrupts the traditional theory–application binary, which usually assumes that abstract knowledge is developed through basic science, to then be interpreted and applied in professional or community contexts. PAR projects are always applied in the sense that they are situated in concrete human and social problems and aim to produce workable local actions. PAR is a very flexible approach. A version of a PAR project could be devised to tackle almost any real-world problem — where the researchers are committed to an emancipatory and participatory epistemology. If one can identify a group of people interested in collectively generating knowledge-for-action in their own context or about their own practices, and as long as the researchers are willing and able to share power, the methods set out in this Primer could be applied to devise a PAR project.

PAR is consonant with participatory movements across multiple disciplines and sectors, and thus finds many intellectual homes. Its application is supported by social movements for inclusion, equity, representation of multiple voices, empowerment and emancipation. For instance, PAR responds to the value “nothing about us without us”, which has become a central tenet of disability studies. In youth studies, PAR is used to enhance the power of young people’s voices. In development studies, PAR has a long foundation as part of the demand for greater participation, to support locally appropriate, equitable and locally owned changes. In health-care research, PAR is used by communities of health professionals to reflect and improve on their own practices. PAR is used by groups of health-care service users or survivors to give a greater collective power to the voices of those at the sharp end of health care, often delegitimized by medical power. In environmental sciences, PAR can support local communities to take action to protect their environments. In community psychology, PAR is valued for its ability to nurture supportive and inclusive processes. In summary, PAR can be applied in a huge variety of contexts in which local ownership of research is valued.

Limitations to PAR’s application often stem from the institutional context. In certain (often dominant) academic circles, local knowledge is not valued, and contextually situated, problem-focused, research may be considered niche, applied or not generalizable. Hence, research institutions may not be set up to be responsive to a community’s situation or needs or to support scholar–activists working at the research–action boundary. Further, those who benefit from, or are comfortable with, the status quo of a community may actively resist attempts at change from below and may undermine PAR projects. In other cases, where a community is very divided or dispersed, PAR may not be the right approach. There are plenty of examples of PAR projects floundering, failing to create an active group or to achieve change, or completely falling through. Even such failures, however, shed light on the conditions of communities and the power relations they inhabit and offer lessons on ways of working and not working with groups in those situations.

Reproducibility and data deposition

Certain aspects of the open science movement can be productively engaged from within a PAR framework, whereas others are incompatible. A key issue is that PAR researchers do not strive for reproducibility, and many would contest the applicability of this construct. Nonetheless, there may be resonances between the open science principle of making information publicly available for re-use and those PAR projects that aim to render visible and audible the experience of a historically under-represented or mis-represented community. PAR projects that seek to represent previously hidden realities of, for example, environmental degradation, discriminatory experiences at the hands of public services, the social history of a traditionally marginalized group, or their neglected achievements, may consider creating and making public robust databases of information, or social history archives, with explicit informed permission of the relevant communities. For such projects, making knowledge accessible is an essential part of the action. Publicly relevant information should not be sequestered behind paywalls. PAR practitioners should thus plan carefully for cataloguing, storing and archiving information, and maintaining archives.

On the other hand, however, a blanket assumption that all data should be made freely available is rarely appropriate in a PAR project and may come into conflict with ethical priorities. Protecting participants’ confidentiality can mean that data cannot be made public. Protecting a community from reputational harm, in the context of widespread dehumanization, criminalization or stigmatization of dispossessed groups, may require protection of their privacy, especially if their lives or coping strategies are already pathologized 25 . Empirical materials do not belong to university-based researchers as data and cannot be treated as an academic commodity to be opened to other researchers. Open science practices should not extend to the opening of marginalized communities to knowledge exploitation by university researchers.

The principle of reproducibility is not intuitively meaningful to PAR projects, given their situated nature, that is, the fact that PAR is inherently embedded in particular concrete contexts and relationships 61 . Beyond reproducibility, other forms of mutual learning and cross-case learning are vitally important. We see increasing research fatigue in communities used, extractively, for research that does not benefit them. PAR teams should assess what research has been done in a setting to avoid duplication and wasting people’s time and should clearly prioritize community benefit. At the same time, PAR projects also aspire to produce knowledge with wider implications, typically discussed under the term generalizability or transferability. They do so by articulating how the project speaks to social, political, theoretical and methodological debates taking place in wider knowledge communities, in a form of “communicative generalisation” 62 . Collaborating and sharing experiences across PAR sites through visits, exchanges and joint analysis can help to generalize experiences 30 , 61 .

Limitations and optimizations

PAR projects often challenge the social structures that reproduce established power relations. In this section, we outline common challenges to PAR projects, to prompt early reflection. When to apply a workaround, compromise, concede, refuse or regroup and change strategy are decisions that each PAR team should make collectively. We do not have answers to all the concerns raised but offer mitigations that have been found useful.

Institutional infrastructure

Universities’ interests in partnerships with communities, local relevance, being outward-facing, public engagement and achieving social impact can help to create a supportive environment for PAR research. Simultaneously, university bureaucracies and knowledge hierarchies that prize their scientists as individuals rather than collaborators and that prioritize the methods of dominant science can undermine PAR projects 63 . When Cowan, Kühlbrandt and Riazuddin 45 proposed using gaming, drama, fiction and film-making for a project engaging young people in thinking about scientific futures, a grants manager responded “But this project can’t just be about having fun activities for kids — where is the research in what you’re proposing?” Research infrastructures are often slow and reluctant to adapt to innovations in creative research approaches.

Research institutions’ funding time frames are also often out of sync with those of communities — being too extended in some ways and too short in others 45 , 64 . Securing funding takes months and years, especially if there are initial rejections or setbacks. Publishing findings takes further years. For community-based partners, a year is a long time to wait and to maintain people’s interest. On the other hand, grant funding for one-off projects over a year or two (or even five) is rarely sufficient to create anything sustainable, reasserting precarity and short-termism. Institutions can better support PAR through infrastructure such as bridging funds between grants, secure staff appointments and institutional recognition and resources for community partners.

University infrastructures can value the long-term partnership working of PAR scholars by recognizing partnership-building as a respected element of an academic career and recognizing collaborative research as much as individual academic celebrity. Where research infrastructures are unsupportive, building relationships within the university with like-minded professional and academic colleagues, to share work-arounds and advocate collectively, can be very helpful. Other colleagues might have developed mechanisms to pay co-researchers, or to pay in advance for refreshments, speed up disbursement of funds, or deal with an ethics committee, IRB, finance office or thesis examiner who misunderstands participatory research. PAR scholars can find support in university structures beyond the research infrastructure, such as those concerned with knowledge exchange and impact, campus–community partnerships, extension activities, public engagement or diversity and inclusion 64 . If PAR is institutionally marginalized, exploring and identifying these work-arounds is extremely labour intensive and depends on the cultivation of human, social and cultural capital over many years, which is not normally available to graduate students or precariously employed researchers. Thus, for PAR to be realized, institutional commitment is vital.

Co-option by powerful structures

When PAR takes place in collaboration or engagement with powerful institutions such as government departments, health services, religious organizations, charities or private companies, co-option is a significant risk. Such organizations experience social pressure to be inclusive, diverse, responsive to communities and participatory, so they may be tempted to engage communities in consultation, without redistributing power. For instance, when ‘photovoice’ projects invite politicians to exhibitions of photographs, their activity may be co-opted to serving the politician’s interest in being seen to express support, but result in no further action. There is a risk that using PAR in such a setting risks tokenizing marginalized voices 65 . In one of our current projects, co-researchers explore the framing of sexual violence interventions in Zambia, aiming to promote greater community agency and reduce the centrality of approaches dominated by the Global North 66 . One of the most challenging dilemmas is the need to involve current policymakers in discussions without alienating them. The advice to ‘be realistic’, ‘be reasonable’ or ‘play the game’ to keep existing power brokers at the table creates one of the most difficult tensions for PAR scholars 48 .

We also caution against scholars idealizing PAR as an ideal, egalitarian, inclusive or perfect process. The term ‘participation’ has become a policy buzzword, invoked in a vaguely positive way to strengthen an organization’s case that they have listened to people. It can equally be used by researchers to claim a moral high ground without disrupting power relations. Depriving words of their associated actions, Freire 7 warns us, leads to ‘empty blah’, because words gain their meaning in being harnessed to action. Labelling our work PAR does not make it emancipatory, without emancipatory action. Equally, Freire cautions against acting without the necessary critical reflection.

To avoid romanticization or co-option, PAR practitioners benefit from being held accountable to their shared principles and commitments by their critical networks and collaborators. Our commitments to community colleagues and to action should be as real for us as any institutional pressures on us. Creating an environment for that accountability is vital. Box  4 offers a project exemplar featuring key considerations regarding power concerns.

Box 4 Case study: participatory power and its vulnerability

Júba Wajiín is a pueblo in a rural mountainous region in the lands now called Guerrero, Mexico, long inhabited by the Me’phaa people, who have fiercely resisted precolonial, colonial and postcolonial displacement and dispossession. Using collective participatory action methods, this small pueblo launched and won a long legal battle that now challenges extractive mining practices.

Between 2001 and 2012, the Mexican government awarded massive mining concessions to mining companies. The people of Júba Wajiín discovered in mid-2013 that, unbeknown to them, concessions for mining exploration of their lands had been awarded to the British-based mining company Horschild Mexico. They engaged human rights activists who used participatory action research methods to create awareness and to launch a legal battle. Tlachinollan, a regional human rights organization, held legal counselling workshops and meetings with local authorities and community elders.

The courts initially rejected the case by denying that residents could be identified as Indigenous because they practised Catholicism and spoke Spanish. A media organization, La Sandia Digital , supported the community to collectively document their syncretic religious and spiritual practices, their ability to speak Mhe’paa language and their longstanding agrarian use of the territory. They produced a documentary film Juba Wajiin: Resistencia en la Montaña , providing visual legal evidence.

After winning in the District court, they took the case to the Supreme Court, asking it to review the legality and validity of the mining concessions. Horschild, along with other mining companies, stopped contesting the case, which led to the concessions being null and void.

The broader question of Indigenous peoples’ territorial rights continued in the courts until mid-2022 when the Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous peoples had the constitutional right to be consulted before any mining activities in their territory. This was a win, but a partial one. ‘Consultations’ are often manipulated by state and private sectors, particularly among groups experiencing dire impoverishment. Júba Wajiín’s strategies proved successful but the struggle against displacement and dispossession is continual.

Power inequalities within PAR

Power inequalities also affect PAR teams and communities. For all the emphasis on egalitarian relationships and dialogue, communities and PAR teams are typically composed of actors with unequal capacities and powers, introducing highly complex challenges for PAR teams.

Most frequently, university-based researchers engaging with marginalized communities do not themselves share many aspects of the identities or life experiences of those communities. They often occupy different, often more privileged, social networks, income brackets, racialized identities, skill sets and access to resources. Evidently, the premise of PAR is that people with different lives can productively collaborate, but gulfs in life experience and privilege can yield difficult tensions and challenges. Expressions of discomfort, dissatisfaction or anger in PAR projects are often indicative of power inequalities and an opportunity to interrogate and challenge hierarchies. Scholars must work hard to undo their assumptions about where expertise and insights may lie. A first step can be to develop an analysis of a scholar’s own participation in the perpetuation of inequalities. Projects can be designed to intentionally redistribute power, by redistributing skills, responsibilities and authority, or by redesigning core activities to be more widely accessible. For instance, Marzi 51 in a participatory video project, used role swapping to distribute the leadership roles of chairing meetings, choosing themes for focus and editing, among all the participants.

Within communities, there are also power asymmetries. The term ‘community participation’ itself risks homogenizing a community, such that one or a small number of representatives are taken to qualify as the community. Yet, communities are characterized by diversity as much as by commonality, with differences across sociological lines such as class, race, gender, age, occupation, housing tenure and health status. Having the time, resources and ability to participate is unlikely to be evenly distributed. Some people need to devote their limited time to survival and care of others. For some, the embodied realities of health conditions and disabilities make participation in research projects difficult or undesirable 67 . If there are benefits attached to participation, careful attention to the distribution of such benefits is needed, as well as critical awareness of the positionality of those involved and those excluded. Active efforts to maximize accessibility are important, including paying participants for their valued time; providing accommodations for people with health conditions, disabilities, caring responsibilities or other specific needs; and designing participatory activities that are intuitive to a community’s typical modes of communication.

Lack of control and unpredictability

For researchers accustomed to leading research by taking responsibility to drive a project to completion, using the most rigorous methods possible, to achieve stated objectives, the collaborative, iterative nature of PAR can raise personal challenges. Sense 68 likens the facilitative role of a PAR practitioner to “trying to drive the bus from the rear passenger seat—wanting to genuinely participate as a passenger but still wanting some degree of control over the destination”. PAR works best with collaborative approaches to leadership and identities among co-researchers as active team members, facilitators and participants in a research setting, prepared to be flexible and responsive to provocations from the situation and from co-researchers and to adjust project plans accordingly 28 , 68 , 69 . The complexities involved in balancing control issues foreground the importance of reflexive practice for all team members to learn together through dialogue 70 . Training and socialization into collaborative approaches to leadership and partnership are crucial supports. Well-functioning collaborative ways of working are also vital, as their trusted structure can allow co-researchers to ‘trust the process’, and accept uncertainties, differing perspectives, changes of emphasis and disruptions of assumptions. We often want surprises in PAR projects, as they show that we are learning something new, and so we need to be prepared to accept disruption.

The PAR outlook is caught up in the ongoing history of the push and pull of popular movements for the recognition of local knowledge and elite movements to centralize authority and power in frameworks such as universal science, professional ownership of expertise, government authority or evidence-based policy. As a named methodological paradigm, PAR gained legitimacy and recognition during the 1980s, with origins in popular education for development, led by scholars from the Global South 16 , 32 , and taken up in the more Global-North-dominated field of international development, where the failings of externally imposed, contextually insensitive development solutions had become undeniable 21 . Over the decades, PAR has both participated in radical social movements and risked co-option and depoliticization as it became championed by powerful institutions, and it is in this light that we consider PAR’s relation to three contemporary societal movements.

Decolonizing or re-powering

The development of PAR took place in tandem with anti-colonial movements and discourses during the 1970s and 1980s, in which the colonization of land, people and knowledge were all at stake. During the mid-2010s, calls for decolonization of the university were forced onto the agenda of the powerful by various groups, including African students and youth leading the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, ‘Fees must Fall’ and ‘Gandhi must Fall’ movements 71 , followed by the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 (ref. 72 ). PAR is a methodology that stands to contribute to decolonization-colonization through the development of alternatives to centralizing knowledge and power. As such, the vitality of local and global movements demanding recognition of grassroots knowledge and the dismantling of oppressive historical power–knowledge systems heralds many openings and exciting potential collaborations and causes for PAR practitioners 73 , 74 . As these demands make themselves felt in powerful institutions, they create openings for PAR.

Yet, just as PAR has been subject to co-option and depoliticization, the concept of decolonization too is at risk of appropriation by dominant groups and further tokenization of Indigenous groups, as universities, government departments and global health institutions absorb the concept, fitting it into their existing power structures 41 , 75 . In this context, Indigenous theorists in Aotearoa/New Zealand are working on an alternative concept of ‘re-powering Indigenous knowledge’ instead of ‘decolonizing knowledge’. By doing so, they centre Indigenous people and their knowledge, instead of the knowledge or actions of colonizers, and foreground the necessity of changes to power relations. African and African American scholars working on African heritage and political agency have drawn on the Akan philosophy of Sankofa for a similar purpose 76 . Sankofa derives from a Twi proverb Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri (It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind). Going back to fetch what is lost is a self-grounded act that draws on the riches of Indigenous history to re-imagine and restructure the future 77 . It is also an act independent of the colonial and colonizing gaze. Contributing to a mid-twenty-first century re-powering community knowledge is a promising vision for PAR. More broadly, the loud voices and visionary leadership of contemporary anti-racist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, intersectional feminist and other emancipatory movements provide a vibrant context to re-invent and renew PAR.

Co-production

In fields concerned with health and public service provision, a renewed discourse of respectful engagement with communities and service users has centred in recent years on the concept of  co-production 78 . In past iterations, concepts such as citizen engagement, patient participation, community participation and community mobilization had a similar role. Participatory methods have proved their relevance within such contexts, for example, providing actionable and wise insights to clinicians seeking to learn from patients, or to providers of social services seeking to target their services better. Thus, the introduction of co-production may create a receptive environment for PAR in public services. Yet again, if users are participating in something, critical PAR scholars should question in which structures they are participating, instantiating which power relations and to whose benefit. PAR scholars can find themselves compromised by institutional requirements. Identifying potential compromises, lines that cannot be crossed and areas where compromises can be made; negotiating with institutional orders; and navigating discomfort and even conflict are key skills for practitioners of PAR within institutional settings.

One approach to engaging with institutional structures has been to gather evidence for the value of PAR, according to the measures and methods of dominant science. Anyon and colleagues 59 systematically reviewed the Youth PAR literature in the United States. They found emerging evidence that PAR produces positive outcomes for youth and argued for further research using experimental designs to provide harder evidence. They make the pragmatic argument that funding bodies require certain forms of evidence to justify funding, and so PAR would benefit by playing by those rules.

A different approach, grounded in politics rather than the academy, situates co-production as sustained by democratic struggles. In the context of sustainability research in the Amazon, for instance, Perz and colleagues 79 argue that the days of externally driven research are past. Mobilization by community associations, Indigenous federations, producer cooperatives and labour unions to demand influence over the governance of natural resources goes hand in hand with expectations of local leadership and ownership of research, often implemented through PAR. These approaches critically question the desirability of institutional, external funding or even non-monetary support for a particular PAR project.

Global–local inequality and solidarity

Insufferable global and local inequalities continue to grow, intensified by climate catastrophes, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and extreme concentrations of wealth and political influence, and contested by increasingly impactful analyses, protests and refusals by those disadvantaged and discriminated against. Considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PAR projects, Auerbach and colleagues 64 identify increasing marketization and austerity in some universities, and the material context of growing pressure on marginalized communities to simply meet their needs for survival, leaving little capacity for participating in and building long-term partnerships. They describe university-based researchers relying on their own capacities to invent new modes of digital collaboration and nourish their partnerships with communities, often despite limited institutional support.

We suggest that building solidaristic networks, and thus building collective power, within and beyond universities offers the most promising grounding for a fruitful outlook for PAR. PAR scholars can find solidarity across a range of disciplines, traditions, social movements, topics and geographical locations. Doing so offers to bridge traditions, share strategies and resonances, build methodologies and politics, and crucially, build power. In global health research, Abimbola and colleagues 80 call for the building of Southern networks to break away from the dominance of North–South partnerships. They conceptualize the South not only as a geographical location, as there are of course knowledge elites in the South, but as the communities traditionally marginalized from centres of authority and power. We suggest that PAR can best maximize its societal contribution and its own development and renewal by harnessing the diverse wisdom of knowledge generation and participatory methods across Southern regions and communities, using that wisdom to participate in global solidarities and demands for redistribution of knowledge, wealth and power.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank their PAR collaborators and teachers, who have shown us how to take care of each other, our communities and environments. They thank each other for generating such a productive critical thinking space and extending care during challenging times.

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Department of Methodology, London School of Economics & Political Science, London, UK

Flora Cornish & Nancy Breton

Departmento de Gestion para el Desarrollo Sustentable, CONACyT–Universidad Autonoma de Guerrero, Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico

Ulises Moreno-Tabarez

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Jenna Delgado

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Ama de-Graft Aikins

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Involving multiple team members in the analysis and interpretation of materials generated, typically in iterative cycles of individual or pair work and group discussion.

Both a structure and a process, community refers to a network of often diverse and unequal persons engaged in common tasks or actions, stakes or interests that lead them to form social ties or commune with one another.

A process through which a person or group’s activities are altered or appropriated to serve another group’s interests.

A term typically used in service provision to describe partnership working between service providers and service users, to jointly produce decisions or designs.

A call to recognize and dismantle the destructive legacies of colonialism in societal institutions, to re-power indigenous groups and to construct alternative relationships between peoples and knowledges that liberate knowers and doers from colonial extraction and centralization of power.

Scholarship that creates knowledge of the conditions that limit or oppress us to liberate ourselves from those conditions and to support others in their own transformations.

Injustices in relation to knowledge, including whose knowledge counts and which knowledge is deemed valid or not.

Research that extracts information and exploits relationships, places and peoples, producing benefit for scholars or institutions elsewhere, and depleting resources at the sites of the research.

Knowledge that is rooted in experience in a particular social context, often devalued by social science perspectives that make claims to generalizability or universality.

The relationships of domination, subordination and resistance between individuals or social groups, allowing some to advance their perspectives and interests more than others.

A methodological practice through which scholars critically reflect on their own positionality and how it impacts on participants and co-researchers, understanding of the topic and the knowledge produced.

An approach to ethical conduct that situates ethics as ongoingly negotiated within the context of respectful relationships, beyond following the procedural rules often set out by ethics committees.

A dual role in which scholars use their knowledge (scholarship) to tackle injustices and instigate changes (activism) in collaboration with marginalized communities and/or organizations.

Doing something or appointing a person for reasons other than in the interest of enabling meaningful change.

A systemic change in which relationships and structures are fundamentally altered, often contrasted with smaller-scale changes such as varying or refining existing relations.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Community-Based Participatory Research

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Community-Based Participatory Research by Sarah Gehlert , Sarah Kye-Price , Venera Bekteshi LAST REVIEWED: 26 June 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 26 June 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389678-0157

This entry identifies resources relevant to social work’s use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches in a variety of settings with a range of topics. CBPR is a process of inclusive participation in research in which academic researchers and community stakeholders work together to create a partnership that extends from the time before a research project begins to after its completion. CBPR represents a balance between research and invoking/realizing community power. This level of community participation distinguishes CBPR from other forms of community-based research. Rather than being a method or theory itself, CBPR is an orientation to research. It may be based on a variety of theories and entail qualitative, quantitative (including randomized clinical trials), or mixed methods. CBPR researchers focus their efforts not only on the substantive research area under investigation but also on the processes of partnership formation, open discussion of power and privilege, identification of common goals, collective action to design and implement research, and community improvement. The ecological nature of CBPR approaches fits well with social work’s multisystemic perspective on human behavior; likewise, CBPR’s emphasis on social justice and community-level change is a clear fit with the values and ethics of social work. The bibliography provided offers an overview of CBPR in areas of particular relevance to scholars and practitioners of social work.

A few sources are useful for providing an overview of CBPR for social workers and other disciplinary and professional scholars. Minkler and Wallerstein 2008 , an edited text now in its second edition, is probably the single-best source on the conceptual basis of CBPR, its application, and research methods. Israel, et al. 2005 takes a slightly different approach, weaving issues in implementing CBPR into applications. The authors address a variety of techniques such a focus groups and Photovoice, which may be useful for those with basic knowledge of CBPR. Stoecker 2005 focuses on community action and change in general, with less emphasis on health than the other sources. Stoecker’s model includes diagnosis, prescription, implementation, and evaluation of community problems. The recently updated Principles of Community Engagement , prepared under the auspices of the Community Engagement Key Function Committee of the National Institute of Health–funded Clinical Translational Science Award, is a broad-based resource for researchers in social work and clinical science who have some experience in CBPR. It focuses on why, when, and how to engage communities effectively. It is published online or in print form.

Clinical and Translational Science Awards Consortium, Community Engagement Key Function Committee Task Force on the Principles of Community Engagement. 2011. Principles of community engagement . 2d ed. NIH Publication 11-7782. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health.

Two major strengths of this text are its extensive bibliography on CBPR and its chapter on program evaluation . The latter addresses both research and process evaluation. This text was designed specifically for CTSAs and is useful for faculty, graduate students, and clinical science scholars integrating community engagement into their existing research agenda.

Israel, Barbara A., Eugenia Eng, Amy J. Schulz, and Edith A. Parker, eds. 2005. Methods in community-based participatory research for health . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This edited text weaves case studies with essential topics such as defining community, and with techniques such as observational tools. Sixteen appendices provide information and templates on policy reports, memoranda of understanding, partnership agreements, and so on. This text would be useful for graduate students and researchers who have already been introduced to CBPR.

Minkler, Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein, eds. 2008. Community-based participatory research for health: From process to outcomes . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

With chapters by experts on CBPR, this text covers issues such as experimental design, power, and analysis, interspersed with case studies and a discussion of how to promote policy change. It is appropriate for graduate students and academic and community researchers and would serve as a good basic text on teaching CBPR to graduate students.

Stoecker, Randy. 2005. Research methods for community change: A project-based approach . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Stoecker’s text focuses beyond health and follows a four-step model of diagnosis of community problems and prescribing, implementing, and evaluating interventions. It is aimed at research novices and would be useful in basic research courses or as a guide for investigators and practitioners engaging in community action.

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Participatory research in social work between aspiration and reality

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Participatory research is defined by a value-based research attitude and research objective. It aims to foster the participation of actors, whose life or work practice is being researched, in two ways: regarding their participation in the research project itself and regarding the goal to contribute to the social participation and empowerment of less powerful social groups. This “research style” (Bergold and Thomas 2012 ) is currently experiencing increased interest and enjoys great recognition in social work in particular. This is not surprising, since the normative orientations of this occupational field of activity are particularly close to the basic values of participatory research, which already indicates that participative research projects set high goals. The contributions of this special issue will discuss in which way and quality as well as to what extent these goals could be and are being achieved in research practice.

This special issue is based on the panels of the Austrian Association for Sociology (ÖGS) section “Social Work” organized at the ÖGS Congress in December 2017. In the following, we do not aim to present a comprehensive discussion of participatory research strategies in social work, as this is being done by the single contributions in this special issue. In particular, Anastasiadis and Wrentschur give a broad overview of the developmental lines and the design of participatory research. Instead, referring to the disciplinary framework of this journal, we provide some sociological considerations regarding the use of the participative approach in research projects and processes.

First of all, it is remarkable that in the scientific debate of participatory research strategies there is little theoretical discussion of the concept of participation. Often scholars only provide the plain reference that their research concerns and aims at involvement, and relate to empirical concepts and normative positions rather than to theoretical concepts in the proper sense. In general, the concept of participation in research assumes that the persons being “researched” in the frame of the research project must also be involved in research-related decision making and that they should be in control of the research process together with the research scientists. This is done, for example, by labelling them “co-researchers”, even though they typically lack corresponding academic education and training, and by seeing them “… as partners with decision-making power in all stages of the research process: from the objective and the design of the study, its implementation, data collection and evaluation to its final exploitation” (Unger 2014 , p. 41; translation by authors).

These considerations already identify two characteristics of the desired participation: (co-)decision-making power and (co-)control of the content, the implementation and the use of results by the co-researchers. Decisions can be understood, on the one hand, as selection of an alternative action (“Selektion einer Handlungsalternative”) (Schimank 2005 , p. 42) or as “an action considering alternative ways” (“Alternativen bedenkendes Handeln”) (ibid., p. 48). In order for something to be considered a decision at all, decision alternatives need to be not only available, but actors also have to be aware of them. Control, on the other hand, requires having sufficient insight into the events taking place, and the authorization to enforce one’s own ideas. Being able to act as a supervisory body to impose sanctions, if necessary, is crucial for exercising control. Of course, more control and decision-making power of the “co-researchers” means less control and decision-making power of the original researchers. From the standpoint of participatory research, the goal is a balance of the power relations between researchers and “co-researchers”.

Related to the concept of “co-researcher” is the understanding of research persons and groups as actors in three ways. They are considered being actors as active participants in the research process, they are understood as actors in their life worlds instead of just perceiving them as victims of social structures and heteronomous clients in institutions of social work, and due to their participation in research they are also expected to be actors in the changes that research, based on the results, wants to foster. Such changes may concern institutions of social work but also changes in politics and society. In sociological discussions on the theoretical concept of agency, it is still an open question, however, whether agency is something that individuals simply possess or whether it is something they have to acquire (Coffey and Farrugia 2014 ). The use of the concept of agency in participatory research seems to imply both: On the on hand, the “researched co-researchers” are already actors in their particular life world. On the other, participatory research aims at enabling and supporting their agency in the research process as well as beyond research regarding desired changes.

In the perspective of differentiation theory and organizational sociology, referring to Bora ( 2005 , p. 22), participation can be understood as a specific form of inclusion. In this understanding the term “inclusion” does not constitute a normative requirement, but rather describes the way in which persons are taken into account and included in social communication on a social-theoretical level. Footnote 1 According to Bora ( 2005 ), participation means inclusion in the form of membership in organizations, taking part in processes and, as one may add with regard to participative research, taking part in projects as temporary forms of organization (see Wimmer 2004 , p. 144). Such inclusion occurs in the form of performance roles (“Leistungsrollen”). Burzan et al. ( 2008 ) distinguish not only performance and audience roles (“Publikumsrollen”) as differing modes of inclusion, but also secondary performance roles and occupational performance roles. In secondary performance roles one’s own performance reception (audience role) results primarily from one’s own performance production (performance role). This is how participation as a co-researcher can be understood.

What is the use of a theoretical linkage of the concept of participation for the understanding of participatory research? It sharpens the eye for the paradoxes and challenges of the project. These are, however, not only based on the intention to include the persons and groups “researched” as researchers, but also result from the bundle of objectives that go beyond traditional research goals: participation in research is meant to enable and support further social participation in societal fields where the researched groups are not yet fully included. More often than not, however, this decision lies beyond the influence of research. Even if research may have some impact, reaching the goal of more social participation depends to a large extent on the social environment, which usually cannot be directly influenced by research.

The contributions submitted to the ÖGS congress 2017 indicate that participatory projects are becoming more frequent among certain groups of clients (“addressees”), whereas such a research strategy appears to be less used in other fields of social work. Specifically, the projects focus on the participatory inclusion into research of people with disabilities, people with migration experience, children and youth as well as of the elderly. These are increasingly also community or neighborhood research projects. This raises the question based on which criteria researchers who initiate a participative project make such fundamental preliminary decisions and which reasons contribute to the restrained inclusion of other addressees of social work in research. This can be illustrated by reflecting upon what a participative research project could look like in the context of social work with criminal offenders, so far neglected by participatory research. Which issues are considered too risky? Do researchers assume restrictions beyond their influence? What ethical challenges does it entail? The following questions, as raised in the Call for Papers for the ÖGS Congress 2017, may also contribute to reflecting on the implementation experiences of participatory research projects:

What are the primary objectives of participatory research? Who defines the goals of participatory research and in which ways? How do different goals, such as gaining knowledge, participation and empowerment, relate to each other?

Which actors participate for what reasons, in which stages of research, in which ways and to what extent? Who can contribute which knowledge and experiences to the research? To what extent do people involved in research bring with them various external social resources (including, but not limited to, power resources) which could also lead to different possibilities of implementing and enforcing their perspectives in the research context? How can unequal resources be compensated, how should required knowledge and skills be taught and acquired?

Which roles do scientists/professional researchers play in participatory research? How can they deal with potential tension and divergences between different roles?

How do decision-making processes take place in the research process and who participates in which roles? Which rules and mechanisms of weighing alternatives and decision-making are applied for which decision-making purposes and content? How are the necessary decisions actually made?

How can a “safe space” be created in the course of research that provides all participants with sufficient openness without having to fear any risks or disadvantages?

How can the results be presented and communicated? Who benefits from these results in which way? What opportunities do participating actors derive from the results for their social positioning and way of life outside the research context? To what extent can research achieve the desired goals (for example gaining knowledge, participation, empowerment) after completing the project? Which framework conditions prove to be conducive so that the projects and their results can have lasting effects, in particular with regard to participation and empowerment?

For a comprehensive understanding of the increased use of participatory research strategies in social work, Alfons Bora’s ( 2005 ) observations can give additional stimuli, even if they were formulated not in terms of research but on participation in the political system. According to Bora’s analyses, a central function of participatory involvement of citizens in political decision-making processes is their political mobilization. It may be advantageous for those in power to include citizens in political decision-making processes if their non-participation threatens to lose legitimacy in political institutions and decisions (e.g. very low voter turnout) or if risky decisions have to be made in politically disputed fields: “In the ideal case presented, this will take away pressure from the political decision-makers and at the same time it promotes acceptance by the addressees through their involvement in the process” (ibid., p. 29; translation by authors). Accordingly, participation in these decision-making contexts should solve the acceptance problems of political decisions and/or institutions by collectivizing decision-making and by spreading the responsibility for possibly undesirable decision-making sequences (diffusion of responsibility). However, Bora argues, this does not reduce the risk of the decision itself, insofar as such intended participation may also provoke strong resistance in the citizens.

If one looks at participatory research projects—for example in social work—from this perspective, then the question becomes decisive, which concrete added value can actually be expected from actors in the field of research by means of directly involving them as co-researchers. Furthermore, researchers have to weigh up what they expect from them in return, which workload and which decision-making to impose on them in the research process. One of the key questions here is whether and how the co- research of actors from the field of research is actually the most appropriate means to bring about or support social change and to increase participation beyond the research process. Conversely, the question must be examined to what extent participation and empowerment could be achieved more sufficiently through education and participation projects. If one reads the present scientific literature on participatory research, it is striking that the potential outcome of participatory research is mostly described rather vaguely: participatory research may enhance participation, may lead to higher practical utility, may lead to more support of empowerment, etc. This, however, is not necessarily the case and the same could be said about any kind of research (especially application-oriented research), which is not conceived and implemented in a participative approach in a narrower sense. Furthermore, as in any empirical research, there should also be methodological control for the co-researchers’ location sensitive aspects (“location bonding”, “Standortgebundenheit” in German, see Wagner-Willi 2016 , p. 228), which influences the results. Participatory research, too, by no means aims at enforcing subjectivity in an uncontrolled way, but rather promotes systematically reflected subjectivity.

These critical questions are not meant to undermine the significance and usefulness of participatory research in social work in general. The articles in this issue suggest, for example, that such a research strategy in the context of social work would be particularly rewarding if a broader involvement of the addressees in the research process succeeds in producing relevant aspects that enable public discussion and make them negotiable. Ultimately, the described projects are not so much about generating basic knowledge, but rather about using different methods to reach specific findings that strengthen the position of the addressees and have a changing effect on the shaping of their social environment. This can be achieved, as the contributions in this special issue suggest, by involving the participants in the research process as actors who experience themselves as capable and powerful to act—some of them for the first time. Another benefit of the participatory approach is the possible visualization of divergences in interpretation between scientists and addressees resp. co-researchers, which may stimulate new processes of understanding and learning and contribute essentially to the scientific discussion and an increase of knowledge.

1 About the contributions

The contributions in this issue highlight topics and research contexts in which such a participatory research strategy can be worthwhile, but they also point out associated challenges and limitations.

The article by Maria Anastasiadis and Michael Wrentschur “Opening research-spaces for social change” addresses the question how social work uses participatory research for societal changes by connecting research and practice. According to their presentation, a significant aspect of participatory research is not only to generate “knowledge for understanding” in the usual understanding of science, but beyond that, “knowledge for action”. Referring to Ranciere’s metaphor of research as “police” and “politics,” the authors clarify the formative content of participatory research and its relevance to contemporary challenges in social work. In particular, the article deals with the question of how the voices and perspectives of otherwise excluded people can be made audible. Thus, the authors conclude, participatory research in social work can make a decisive contribution to shaping the social.

In his article “On the further development of Paulo Freire’s principle of coding/decoding in participatory social space research: The example of the analysis of space-appropriation by young people in a community center”, Michael May brings together and reflects three theoretical strands of (social) pedagogy: participatory research, social space research (“Sozialraumforschung”) and the concept of coding and decoding by Paulo Freire. His considerations are concerned with young people in extra-curricular (“open”) youth work and the core question how they make the available space their own (“Raumaneignung”). He presents research with young people who were asked to take pictures of different space segments in a community center and of ways of using them. This allows the young people to develop new ideas how to use the rooms in the community center for representing their own life situation and experience, and it allows the researchers to reconstruct the young people’s specific, space-related interests. The results are also meant to be used by the social workers for the young people’s benefit but May admits that the practical implementation of the results depends on the social workers’ willingness to actually use them.

Anne Van Rießen and Christian Bleck also address a socio-spatial perspective in their contribution “Participatory social space research with refugees and immigrants: Methodical considerations and experiences of factors promoting and inhibiting social work” . First, they argue that socio-spatial action research on people with a refugee or migration experience is specifically relevant: The integration of refugees and migrants into society depends on the particular social-spatial situation such as the local labor market, the housing situation and neighborly relationships. Participative social space research pursues the strategy of creating space that allows involvement and participation. The authors illustrate supportive and preventive factors for realizing participatory goals by presenting two of their own research projects: the first research project is about participative neighborhood development with older migrants and the second one deals with the perception, appropriation and use of urban spaces by young refugees on the one hand and young people without refugee history on the other.

The approach of inclusive research presented by Gertraud Kremsner and Michelle Proyer “Doing inclusive research: Possibilities and limitations of joint research practice” was developed in research cooperation with people with learning difficulties. Referring to Walmsley and Johnson ( 2003 ), the authors propose to understand inclusive research as an umbrella term for different research approaches that involve the “researched” persons and groups as subjects in research. There are, however, obvious parallels with participatory research, which leads to assume that participatory and inclusive research differ primarily by varying traditions of labelling in different fields of research. The paper discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with inclusive research based on research with people with learning difficulties and on another research project with refugees. It shows, for example, how some conflicts of roles and conflicts of interest arises in the first place through the inclusive research process itself. The authors claim that the limits of participation have to be made transparent in order to prevent disappointment, for example regarding expectations of participation outside the research context.

In his article “Forum Theatre as a tool of drama based, participatory research in social work. Methods, examples, and methodological reflexions”, Michael Wrentschur addresses and reflects upon the specific method of “Forum Theatre” and its use in participatory research in social work. The article is strongly theoretically based but also uses research of its own to illustrate the potential of the specific method. Forum Theatre aims at empowering participants who belong to socially marginalized and excluded groups. Referring to his empirical work, he describes that applying Forum Theatre in settings of social work allows participants (clients) to experience agency and to express their own needs. The drama-based participatory approach seeks not only to empower the participants during the performances but also in the process of interpretation. Consequently, the results are not only meant to be crucial for the scientific state-of-the-art but also for the practical work with the clients and for the whole social groups the clients belong to. Therefore, with the inclusion of many actors, the overall goal is to develop suggestions and solutions to social inequalities and to political problems.

The article by Miriam Sitter “Participative research with children—a reflected balancing act between generational asymmetry and intergenerational forbearance” reflects the participatory approach used in research with children by referring to the ideas of the international “Childhood Studies”. Following their approach, the goal of participatory research with children is to consider the unequal power relation in two ways (children/adults and researcher/the “researched”) and to find a possible balance between the researched children and the adult researcher. Sitter argues that children have to be understood as co-researchers and collaborators that should not only have equal rights but should also be treated with “intergenerational forbearance” (“intergenerationale Nachsicht”). Based on her research, however, she also describes challenges and unsolved problems regarding the application of participative research with children, for example if and how children should already get involved as co-researchers in an early stage of research (proposal writing) or how to deal with the children’s complete lack of understanding of social science research and how to overcome the children’s focus on natural sciences.

In their article “‘One has to be content at some point’—reconstructing the needs of older adults in rural areas by using participation methods”, Yvonne Rubin, Monika Alisch, and Martina Ritter put forward an approach of transdisciplinary participative research for discussion on the basis of a research project on the problems of elderly people in rural areas. In this project, researchers, activists and addresses in citizens’ aid associations were jointly involved. An essential task of this project was to examine the needs of the elderly in rural areas. An interpretation phase of the scientists was followed by a reflection of the interpreted results with the project partners in so-called feedback events. In these, the same needs that were understood as publicly relevant by the researchers were often classified as private needs by the elderly. By repeatedly addressing this ambivalence of interpretations, it was possible to stimulate a learning process in the participating citizen’s aid associations and to enhance the awareness of the diversity of interpretations in politics.

The contributions of this ÖZS special issue reflect the heterogeneous research and thematic fields of social work in which participatory research is applied. It remains to be seen whether and in which forms of implementation this research approach will become even more important in the context of social work. In the end, one decisive factor will be to what extent, in the long term, it will be possible to translate the high expectations of the approach into research projects, which then lead to significant societal changes in favor of the addressees of social work.

This sociological concept of inclusion is thus not congruent with the conceptual understanding of inclusive research as used by Kremsner and Proyer in this special issue.

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Mayrhofer, H., Waechter, N. & Pflegerl, J. Participatory research in social work between aspiration and reality. Österreich Z Soziol 44 (Suppl 3), 1–8 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-019-00383-y

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• Introduction
• PAR in/for social work and approaches to collaboration
• What types of knowledge are produced by PAR in/for social work?
• The cycle for connecting experiences, evidence and exploration in CPRSW
• Evaluating CPRSW
• Collaborative environment: respectfulness, honesty and practitioner-led learning
• Flexibility and diversity
• Empowerment and ownership
• Pedagogy of discomfort in collaboration
• Acknowledgements
• Conflict of interest

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Collaborative practice research in social work: piloting a model for research and professional learning during COVID-19

Given the quintessentially collaborative nature of social work practice research, many researchers have explored the utility of participatory action research for promoting collaborative learning and knowledge production in social work. As a response to this call for participatory practice research methodology, we developed and piloted ‘collaborative practice research in social work’ in the project, ‘Empowering Social Workers in Challenging Times: Learning from Best Practice during COVID-19’. ‘Collaborative practice research in social work’ is a networked approach to social work participatory practice research, designed to integrate practice wisdom and research evidence to produce useful knowledge for social workers to practise ethically and effectively during COVID-19. This article will present some findings from the evaluation of ‘collaborative practice research in social work’, showing how the reversed sequence of involvement (practitioner researchers first and then academics) in research can enable practitioner-led learning, democratise knowledge production and help validate different types of knowledge in social work practice research. ‘Collaborative practice research in social work’ has demonstrated the need to address alienating academic practices that are not sensitive to the needs of practice or see practice as an afterthought. Findings further suggest the need to better prepare academic researchers to engage with participatory practice research, which can be an emotionally unsettling and unfamiliar research environment.

Social work practice research has established as a genre of social work research over the last three decades ( Thyer, 1989 ; Scott, 1990 ; Shaw, 2007 ), with the Salisbury Statement published in 2011 as one of the milestones ( Salisbury Forum Group, 2011 ). The statement marks a departure from the well-accepted notions of ‘scientific practitioner’ and evidence-based practice, which primarily promote research-led practice. Instead, the statement stipulates that it is a two-way road to bring research and practice closer to each other: making practice more research informed and research more practice near. Indicating that social work practitioner–academic collaboration is the preferred model of knowledge production, the statement invites further attention to the collaborative nature of social work practice research and the different modes of knowledge production, including ‘practice research’ and ‘practitioner research’ ( Mitchell et al, 2008 ; Uggerhøj, 2011 ).

The successive Helsinki Statement ( Nordic Social Work Research, 2014 ) for social work practice research turned the focus to developing practice-near research by involving service users, social workers and academics in the process of negotiating realities and producing useful knowledge. There is repeated emphasis on research methodology being participatory and dialogical for validating different forms of expertise. The idea of inclusivity and diversity, partly as a commitment to social justice but also as a way to provide a critical scholarship for social work practice research, was later extended to foregrounding the varied and varying political, cultural and social contexts where social work practice and research are undertaken, especially outside Western democracies (see Hong Kong Statement, Sim et al, 2019 ).

The synergy between social work practice research, given its quintessentially collaborative nature, and participatory action research (PAR) has been explored by many researchers. PAR, sometimes called ‘participatory research’ (PR), is a research approach that emphasises working ‘with’ instead of ‘on’ people. According to the UK Participatory Research Network (UKPRN) website, the aim of PAR/PR ‘is to maximize the participation of those whose life or work is the subject of the research’ ( UKPRN, n.d. ). Those traditionally seen as the receivers and users of knowledge are involved in the design, implementation and dissemination of research, making decisions on the knowledge production process to ensure the usefulness, relevance and workability of the produced knowledge ( Kong, 2016 ). The proliferation of this area of literature was evidenced by a simple keyword search for ‘social work’ AND ‘participatory action research’ on the Web of Science on 20 July 2022, resulting in 6,015 publications since 2011, with most of them published in the US (1,936), England (1,066), Canada (786), Australia (562) and Spain (354).

Informed by this body of research, we developed a novel approach to social work participatory practice research – ‘collaborative practice research for social work’ (CPRSW) – at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. In August 2020, mirroring the rapid shift to remote and later hybrid practice in social work during the COVID-19 crisis ( Pink et al, 2021 ), the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and Durham University acted swiftly to set up an online Social Work Practitioner Research Network for piloting CPRSW. The pilot of this new methodology was carried out under the project, ‘Empowering Social Workers in Challenging Times: Learning from Best Practice during COVID-19’, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account (ESRC IAA) and has been granted ethical approval by Durham University. The network initially consisted of six Durham University researchers and eight social workers from England and Wales (see Table 1 ). Keeping with a move from linear knowledge transfer to developing cooperative knowledge production ( Gray and Schubert, 2013 ), the network co-analysed 2,222 qualitative responses from UK social workers collected by the BASW’s ‘Ongoing Survey on Social Work during COVID-19’ (hereafter, the BASW survey) during the first COVID-19 national lockdown. The analysis captured UK social workers’ worries, challenges and good practice during the first COVID-19 national lockdown (March–August 2020) ( Kong et al, 2021a ) and informed the production of the reflective activist toolkit ( Kong et al, 2021b ), an article in a professional magazine and a research article ( Kong et al, 2021c ).

Demographics of interview participants

This article begins with an overview of how PAR has been applied in social work research to illustrate the novelty of CPRSW – an online networked approach to participatory practice research for collaborative learning. We then articulate the design and implementation of CPRSW, including how it was piloted and evaluated in the UK context. Based on the data collected in questionnaires and interviews with co-researchers in the pilot, we present analysis of the processes and outcomes of CPRSW to illustrate how it challenges existing epistemological hierarchy and promotes egalitarian knowledge production. In the discussion, we will consider the distinctiveness of our methodology in relation to similar approaches of participatory practice research and its value for wider application.

PAR in/for social work

This literature review on PAR in/for social work is based on the search results obtained by a Boolean search for journal articles published in English since 2011, the publication year of the Salisbury Statement. The initial search was performed on the Web of Science on 20 July 2022, having identified 6,015 publications that contains both ‘participatory action research’ AND ‘social work’ in their titles/abstracts. After excluding non-journal and non-English studies, we further narrowed down the publications to the social work field, resulting in 491 publications (see Appendix 1 1 ). It is worth noting that this is not a systematic review of PAR in social work but a literature review that helps situate CPRSW in the wider scheme of participatory social work practice research.

The identified set of literature has clearly demonstrated a wide range of application of PAR in understanding and advancing social work education and practice. PAR has been carried out in many fields of practice, such as community development, migration support, medical social work, trauma-informed practice, health–social care integration and health disparities, mental health, learning disabilities, youth work, domestic violence support, technology-assisted social work, ecosocial work, and decolonial/indigenous social work (see Appendix 1). McBeath et al ( 2021 ) considered PR as a social work-specific PAR approach, whereas Uggerhøj et al ( 2018 ) argues that PR might not be necessarily collaborative or participatory, though it might often involve social workers in one way or another.

In spite of great interest in using PAR to bring social work research and practice closer to each other, very few social work PAR studies explicitly link to the discussion of practice research, practitioner research or participatory practice research. Among the 491 articles on social work participatory research, only three explicitly mentioned ‘practice research’ and one mentioned ‘practitioner research’ in their titles/abstracts. In the following, we will present how PAR has been applied in social work research in terms of the approaches to collaboration and types of knowledge produced.

Most of the identified articles did not specify their PAR approach; rather, they treat it as a generic approach for involving social workers and/or service users from a single site or multiple sites of practice as steering committee members or co-researchers to shape and develop social work learning and intervention. There were also studies that do not embrace a full-on PAR but explore the utility of participatory methods, such as mapping, photovoice and participatory diagramming, for capturing marginalised voices. Among articles where specific PAR approaches are mentioned, community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the most cited one (119 articles). These studies involved service users, community practitioners and other community stakeholders in advocating for cultural, attitudinal, institutional and policy change, often associating themselves with critical and radical social work practice to justify their methodological choice. Often, these studies’ major goal was to enhance the communities’ capacity and social capital for learning, knowledge production and problem solving, reflecting the community work tradition of social work practice that might have been reduced significantly because of the neoliberalisation of social work profession ( Bortoletto, 2017 ; Westoby et al, 2019 ). Meanwhile, some other social work CBPR studies (15 articles) focus on decolonising social work and centring indigenous knowledge and their life-worlds. For example, Godden ( 2021 ) explored with indigenous communities in Peru the idea of ‘ buen vivir ’, which is a value-based love-driven framework for ‘living well’ with both people and nature. Feminist PAR (two articles) and appreciative inquiry (two articles) were also explicitly employed to work with, respectively, people who have experienced gender-based violence ( Johnson and Flynn, 2021 ), women living with HIV ( Greene et al, 2021 ) and sexual health disparities ( Loutfy et al, 2016 ), and people with disabilities ( Roy et al, 2021 ).

The approach to collaboration in these studies is primarily community/group based, carried out in a single site or multiple sites. Some collaboration required the formation of advisory groups, co-inquiry groups and action groups, whereas some were carried out with established community organisations or peer-led networks, for example, a Facebook group for young people to discuss mental health problems ( Gillard et al, 2014 ) and community-based organisations dealing with loss and death ( Kleijberg et al, 2020 ). Only two studies formed their own networks for promoting practice-based research: the Practice-Based Research Network in Los Angeles ( Kelly et al, 2015 ) and the Professional Collaboration Network ( Sage et al, 2021 ). We will return to issues these papers raise in the discussion to explore the potential of a networked approach to social work participatory practice research.

Through collaboration, co-researchers in social work PAR produced both theoretical and practical-ethical knowledge, aiming to improve intervention and service processes and outcomes, empower marginalised communities, centre indigenous voices and knowledge, offer critical views on structural oppression, provide alternative conceptualisation of key social work ideas, and develop new education and practice models/frameworks. McBeath et al ( 2021 ) contend that PAR in/for social work can produce professionally focused and organisationally situated knowledge through social work researcher–practitioner–manager–user collaboration. Banks et al ( 2021 ) also pointed out how PAR could build awareness of situated ethics in social work practice.

Fox et al ( 2021 ) argued that PAR can foster egalitarian knowledge exchange between academic researchers and practitioners, making a case for the important roles that ‘pracademics’/practitioner researchers play in transdisciplinary learning and producing both theoretical and practical knowledge. It might be harder to think about how academics involved in social work PAR could transgress the disciplinary boundaries to become ‘academic practitioners’, especially in countries and services where social work practice is narrowly defined as statutory work for adult and children safeguarding, such as the UK. While the possibility for academics to participate in action/practice might be more restricted in clinical or service-dependent practices, it is much more plausible at the community level of interventions. For example, in many CBPR studies included in this literature review, academics themselves have been involved in community organising (facilitating bonding, bridging and knowledge exchange) and mobilising social movements against racism, sexism and homophobia.

Literature on PAR in/for social work has pointed to the need for a more inclusive theorisation of participatory practice research, which features a spectrum of transdisciplinary learning and role taking. The current theorisation of participatory practice research suggests a division of labour between academic researchers and practitioner researchers, with the former leading research and the latter leading learning in their own practice ( Uggerhøj et al, 2018 ). However, this theorisation might be too restrictive for making sense of cross-site and cross-country learning, or participatory practice research carried out in non-clinical settings, such as in the place-based communities or communities organised around social and policy issues. The CPRSW in discussion is one of the few networked approaches for producing knowledge beyond one single site, with the aim to continuously redraw the established academic–practitioner/research–practice boundaries for producing relevant and useful knowledge.

CPRSW: rationale, design and processes

CPRSW, by design, is a network-based participatory approach to social work practice research. The networked approach was a response to some well-identified organisational barriers that hinder social workers’ participation in research, for example, the lack of research support, heavy workloads and lack of funding ( Harvey et al, 2013 ). By pooling together research and practice expertise in a network, social workers can find research support from their practitioner and academic peers who are not from their direct practice, and learn from the diverse skill sets owned by network members to develop knowledge and research skills relevant to addressing their intellectual and practical concerns. With all the meetings and trainings being accredited as continuous professional development (CPD) by the BASW, it also helps offset some of the extra workload that their participation in research might bring. External funding and resources coming from both impact-focused funding and the BASW further created learning opportunities that single service agencies might not be able to offer with their often very strained resources. This methodology thereby sees practice wisdom and research evidence as equally valid forms of knowing, and consistently seeks ways to integrate, link and utilise the two forms of knowing in practically and ethically meaningful ways for informing social work practice ( Kong, 2016 ; Kong et al, 2021b ).

Social workers’ experiences are both evidence and instruments for analysis: they are the former when the experiences are systematically collected for informing understanding of social work practice/theories/research; while they are the latter when social workers are involved in the interpretive process of data, drawing also on their practical insights and professional positional knowledge (as a front-line social worker, manager, practice educator or strategic planner for local authorities). This approach stipulates the roles of social workers’ experiences in producing theories for practice and theories from practice, and further suggests the possibility of linking these two types of research together through the cyclical process delineated in Figure 1 .

Collaborative Practice Research for Social Work is a methodology underpinned by the cycle of integrating experience, evidence and exploration

Citation: European Social Work Research 1, 1; 10.1332/XPUV7930

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In this methodology, social work practitioner researchers are supported to use their own experience to interpret research evidence, and these individual interpretations will be deliberated in small groups to generate possible consensus or identify differences. The deliberation process will help building theories from practice experiences and data. These local theories will further inform individual social workers’ exploration of and responses to the issue, verifying their validity and applicability in their own practice contexts. These new practice experiences will then shape social work practitioner researchers’ later interpretation of research evidence as the cycle goes on.

For ensuring egalitarian and democratic collaboration between social workers and academics in CPRSW, academic–practitioner collaboration started at the proposal development stage. Sui-Ting Kong from Durham University and Jane Shears from the BASW co-developed and implemented a three-phase process when piloting CPRSW, outlined in the following.

Phase 1: Practitioners learning and setting the research agenda

This took place when social workers’ face-to-face visits were halted and massive disruptions were caused in social care by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the constantly changing policies ( Kong et al, 2021a ). There was a huge demand for useful knowledge to guide practice in chaotic situations, and this project therefore set up the UK Social Work Practitioner Research Network for collaborative data analysis on the BASW survey. Eight social work practitioners from children and adult services in both England and Wales participated in setting the agenda for the research project and agreed on the training needed before academics joined the team at a later stage.

Phase 2: Practitioners getting training on research skills and prepared for handling data

In this phase, a CPD course was co-developed with network members, aiming to enhance practitioner researchers’ capacity to utilise secondary data to inform their practice during COVID-19. The CPD course consisted of training workshops on social work practitioner research, qualitative data analysis (coding, conceptualisation and collaborative analysis), NVivo demonstration and writing, co-delivered by Sui-Ting Kong, Jane Shears and Catrin Noone. (Catrin Noone is the researcher on the ‘Empowering Social Workers in Challenging Times’ project. She was responsible for coordinating the network meetings, supporting collaborative learning and carrying out preliminary data analysis. She also contributed to both the final report and academic outputs of the project.) The course also helped identify and develop a community of social workers interested in carrying out research in/for their practice by providing opportunities for them to network and share knowledge with other practitioner researchers. At the end of Phase 2, social work practitioner researchers held a general meeting to discuss their collaboration with university academic researchers and how best to conduct a co-analysis of the BASW survey.

Phase 3: Forming a team of practitioners and academics for co-analysis and co-writing

Academic researchers and practitioner researchers collaboratively analysed the data collected in the BASW survey. This process was facilitated by six joint meetings and six separate small working-group meetings. The former involved discussing the codes, concepts and themes emerging from the data analysis, while the latter was for individuals/groups to work on a set of data/concepts/themes. The data analysis was organised using the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis package NVivo 2020, and the NVivo file was made available for all co-researchers involved in this project to scrutinise/work on collaboratively.

This reversed sequence of involvement (practitioner researchers first and academic researchers second) embedded in the design aimed to empower social workers to feel comfortable to share their experiences, worries and challenges in undertaking research, and allowed sufficient time for practitioner researchers to get familiar with the data before the co-analysis began. Therefore, only in the third phase of the project did Durham University researchers join with the practitioner researchers to collaboratively analyse the data and produce materials useful for professional practice. The collaborative process led to outputs that targeted different audiences, including front-line social workers, social work managers and academics.

During the third phase of the project, Evgenia Stepanova joined the project as independent evaluator, aiming to assess the effectiveness of training and the quality of collaborative learning. Two practitioner researchers and two academic researchers, including all the authors of this article, formed an evaluation team to discuss, deepen and advance the initial analysis put forward by Evgenia Stepanova. Data used for evaluating CPRSW included:

five recordings of the CPD sessions in Phase 2;

two rounds of an online survey administered at the fourth and fifth months of the project (Phase 3), with eight responses collected from the first sweep of the survey and three responses collected in the second sweep of the total of 14 active co-researchers; and

eight qualitative interviews (also referred to as conversations) carried out with four practitioner researchers and four academic researchers to explore their experiences, views and motivations for joining the project, as well as perceived outcomes on their personal and professional development.

Thematic analysis was performed with the aid of NVivo 12. Emerging themes were presented back to the wider network in five of the regular meetings to get feedback and ensure their relevance and closeness to practitioner researchers’ experiences. The evaluation of CPRSW forms the part of the analysis elucidated in this article.

The CPRSW approach created a collaborative environment that allowed participants to engage with one another with honesty and mutual respect. This environment was sustained by agreeing on and enforcing ground rules for respectful exchanges. This was particularly important when dealing with disagreements in interpreting research findings and inferring the causes for some observations. An example is when the network was discussing why mental health services suffered disproportionately during the pandemic and adult social workers and children social workers put forward drastically different explanations: the former attributed the lack of resources in adult services to an overemphasis on child protection, whereas the latter felt that it was just a matter of increased demands and maintained that children should take priority. Ground rules helped contain the tension and allowed the facilitator to explore different plausible explanations with the group that were less antagonising.

The collaborative environment also depends on building relationships that are ‘founded on a shared purpose: [professional] development’ ( Wallerstein and Martinez, 1994 : 313). Many practitioner researchers spoke of the common experience of not having a strong research culture at their workplace and their eagerness to expand and exercise their research skills in and on social work practice as their major motivation to participate in the network. Several practitioner researchers reported that they perceived the project meeting as “something to look forward to” and often viewed the meetings as rewarding. Being online and across services by design, the network approach clearly provided the opportunity for social workers from different service units and different parts of the country to collaborate on a social work research project. The professionally diverse but like-minded group became a safe space for practitioner researchers to share their professional observations, thoughts and feelings, which can sometimes be misinterpreted as criticism in one’s workplace. Honest exchange is crucial for contextualising findings about social workers’ experiences during COVID-19. Some potentially sensitive topics discussed in the network included the inadequacy of support from senior management, the influence of politics on COVID-19 measures, the lack of protection for the most vulnerable, austerity and the neoliberalisation of adult and children services.

Through having social work practitioners join the project and co-develop the research and learning agenda before joining up with the wider group of academics, the project tailored learning opportunities to suit individual practitioners’ preferences and needs. Mapping out the research process alongside practitioner researchers’ interests and skills led to training sessions on participatory research, thematic analysis and the use of NVivo. Academic researchers joining later in the project were briefed about the research agenda and training that took place in the project group, creating a reversed sequence of involvement compared to conventional research led by academic researchers.

‘It’s just a way that you can come to it when you’re ready. And I think that’s, to me is how participation should work. It shouldn’t be a linear process with people all participating in the same way for the same amount of time. We have to create environments that support people to participate on their own terms. And I think that worked pretty well for us [and] for academics. Because otherwise, I think a lot of people would have been caught off balance.’ (Emily, academic researcher)

While some co-researchers had less time to engage in data analysis, there were also those who wanted to gain experience of analysing data with NVivo. Depending on the project phase, participants met as often as once a week to once a month. All sessions were designed as group work, with smaller breakout group and joint discussions. These opportunities to collaborate allowed participants to establish good relationships with other co-researchers and take on shared responsibility for a research task: ‘Having insight from across disciplines is brilliant. Everyone has something to offer and it’s great to build the network and see what we all can contribute’ (anonymous response to questionnaire).

The variety of project activities, such as co-producing policy briefs, practice guidance and reports, as well as launching webinars, further created space for participants’ voices to be heard. They allowed various ways to contribute to the research outputs and express one’s opinions. Practitioner researchers, such as Anne, said that they felt CPRSW had been “a genuine attempt at collaboration, rather than a tokenistic attempt”, and contested their preconceived idea that research was about academics leading, with practitioners only “allowed to do tiny bits of it”. The varied outputs also diversify learning opportunities to suit the skills and learning needs of individuals. Instead of prioritising academic outputs, which are often written in jarring language and might not serve the purpose of aiding practice in critical times, diversified outputs enabled co-researchers with diverse interests to invest themselves in the process, which motivated them to participate in the knowledge production and dissemination processes that speak to their professional learning goals.

‘I was supported and assisted to be able to offer … you can tell I wasn’t confident about those areas of the journey…. I think that [I] shy away from that. I was able to kind of say, “Look, this is what I’m saying.” And I was helped to work through it because I had some negative thoughts.’ (Kate, practitioner researcher)

The flexibility and diversity in learning, previously discussed, led to other positive outcomes for participating individuals: feeling empowered and belonging. Democratic decision-making mechanisms, the practitioner-led and practice-oriented learning processes, and research activities for integrating experience and evidence afforded a sense of control and ownership among practitioner researchers. These empowering practices are embedded in the project design but need to be backed up by ensuring co-researchers’ equal access to resources and fair recognition of each other’s contribution in both the processes and the outputs.

By analysing the ‘empowering moments’ expressed by co-researchers, it has become clear to us that those opportunities to speak for themselves and to be heard are crucial to dismantling epistemic hierarchy: “I felt very valued in contributions that I can make. And that’s felt quite genuine and quite authentic. I mean, you are key figures in this project in the first place” (Anne, practitioner researcher). Instead of leading the research activities, academics facilitated and enabled practitioners to make best use of their practical experience, professional insights and analytical skills to interpret data. Thus, practitioners saw that their voices mattered, ‘views are valued’ and they could ‘influence the course of events’. Better integration of practice experience and front-line observations in social work practice research is of paramount importance for producing relevant, useful and up-to-date knowledge, especially amid the public health crisis of a pandemic, when systematic data collection is challenging and the situations are complex and rapidly developing.

The reversed sequence of involvement in the CPRSW process also unsettled the assumptions that academics always know better and more about how research should be done. Since practitioner researchers had time to prepare themselves in advance of the co-analysis with academics, they felt less intimidated when engaging in research dialogues at a later stage, whereas academics were put in a situation where they needed to acquire skills for collaborative learning, which could make them feel left behind: “I think that social workers always feel intimidated by academics, and in order to avoid that, the social workers had more, sort of, power and flexibility from the start, but it led to academics being left behind” (Tara, academic researcher).

‘It’s really good to speak to people who are looking at issues, deeply reviewing, surveying the literature that’s around. And there is a huge amount all over the world and certainly in England and in Britain as well. So, it’s really good to actually not only be able to read things that people have written like yourselves from but actually to be able to converse with people and have dialogue with people, and looking at up-to-date ideas.’ (Amit, practitioner researcher)

However, the larger joint meetings “with the very experienced academics” are still “slightly more intimidating” than small group discussions, as noted in the anonymous evaluation questionnaires.

Practitioner researchers reported that enthusiasm, individual attention to each researcher and the strong commitment of the project leader served as powerful forces for learning and collaboration. This might indicate the need for the initiating researcher of CPRSW to personalise support and encourage the expression of opinions in due process, demonstrating the criticality of an ethics of care to participatory research ( Gilligan, 1993 ; Banks, 2013 ). Acknowledging and responding to individual researchers’ differences in terms of their level of practice and research skills, experiences, level of confidence, views and perspectives, and life circumstances, it was found by many co-researchers that they felt they had “equal opportunity to develop either knowledge or skills, or any other valuable aspects” (quotes taken from the anonymous evaluation questionnaires), in the CPRSW pilot.

The reversed sequence of involvement and a focus on empowering practitioner researchers in CPRSW are strategies to swap the ownership and leadership in the process/structure for knowledge production, but they also engendered uncomfortable emotions among academics. Feelings of unease and confusion, as well as a sense of misplacement, were expressed by academics when they first joined the project: “I suppose I felt when I went, you know, when asked to go to the online meeting, I felt rather unprepared. Do you know the expression? Yes, and I am happy to wing it, but I am not sure.… It just is simply, it’s just an unusual experience” (Alena, academic researcher). Some practitioner researchers were aware of the unease and sense of discomfort felt by academic researchers. They described academics’ experience in CPRSW as “sweating” at first but maintained that there was a “balance” in participation in general and “the journey was in the right direction” (quotes from the anonymous evaluation questionnaires).

Interviewer: ‘If it wasn’t titled “collaborative focus groups”, what would you call it?’ Alena (academic): ‘Well, I just, I didn’t recognise any of the qualities of focus group…. I mean, it may be that I’ve got a very old-fashioned view of focus groups, but I suppose I’m very tied to Morgan’s work on focus groups. That for me, focus group is a way [that] you are trying to generate ideas of thinking and experiences, ideas, thinking from different people in a group about a particular area. Yeah, I’ve never been– If it was called “collaborative data analysis”, I would have understood it.’

The experience and feelings of Alena indicated the need to better prepare academics in participating in collaborative research with practitioners, especially when practitioners also take on the role as researchers, whereas not all academics maintain their participation in practice. In response to that, Tara, an academic researcher, suggested: “But I think for the academics to be introduced to the practitioner research group on day one of the CPD, and plus some of the academics who were going to be involved later, could perhaps have done one or two short training sessions.” Introducing academics to the team at the beginning and negotiating the openness of the CPD training for academic researchers might be helpful for preparing academics for collaborative learning in CPRSW. Creating a separate space for academics to identify and articulate the discomfort, and to enable reflection on the structure and root causes of these feelings, will be needed in future implementation of CPRSW, drawing on the pedagogy of discomfort ( Boler, 1999 ; Nadan and Stark, 2017 ).

Research and practice integration has long been a priority in health and social care. Within social work, there have been various approaches developed over the years to achieve this goal, namely, practice-near research ( Cooper, 2009 ; Winter et al, 2015 ), evidence-based/informed practice ( Epstein, 2011 ; Thyer and Meyers, 2011 ), social work implementation science ( Cabassa, 2016 ), practice research ( Julkunen and Uggerhøj, 2016 ), practitioner research ( Shaw, 2005 ; Shaw and Lunt, 2012 ) and service user-led research ( Beresford, 2013 ; Boxall and Beresford, 2013 ). While some of these approaches emphasise what types of knowledge should count, some others focus on who should be doing research/producing knowledge. What is common to these diverse responses is the involvement of different stakeholders: social work practitioners, service users and carers. They are involved, at the minimum, in the dissemination and utilisation of the research evidence, and, at most, in co-production and practice.

A networked approach to social work participatory research is a rather unusual one. Existing literature on similar approaches shows that they are either service specific ( Kelly et al, 2015 ) or have a focus on knowledge dissemination and utilisation, rather than knowledge production ( Sage et al, 2021 ). Kelly et al ( 2015 ) set up the Recovery-Oriented Care Collaborative, as one of the other 152 established practice-based research networks (PBRNs) in the US, for fostering collaboration between academic researchers, clinicians and mental health practitioners in learning and research. Sage et al ( 2021 ) set up professional collaborative networks (PCNs) to enhance the social capital, relational capital and digital literacy of social work students, and hence the social work workforce, for utilising research knowledge. Unlike CPRSW, these approaches aim to make practice more evidence based/informed but do not address alienating academic practices that are not sensitive to the needs of practice or see practice as an afterthought. Neither do they challenge the research-to-practice direction of knowledge transfer, leaving practice knowledge still at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy.

CPRSW addresses both the epistemological and social hierarchies in social work knowledge production, which are characterised by practice wisdom, tacit knowledge and practical experience being seen as less valid than research evidence and theories. CPRSW advocates for the validation of experience and evidence as equally relevant to social work professional knowledge development: first, by seeing experience as both data and instrument for interpreting and contextualising research data; and, second, by acknowledging practitioners’ roles in setting the research agenda, data analysis, writing up and disseminating research when given the right environment and support. This can be seen as a type of participatory practice research that does not, however, conform to the traditional division of labour between practitioner researchers and academic researchers, with the former responsible for professional learning and the latter for research and theoretical development ( Uggerhøj et al, 2018 ).

Evaluation of the pilot of CPRSW shows that the reversed sequence of involvement in a collaborative research process can increase the confidence, research capacity and motivation of practitioner researchers in conducting research. Flexibility in participation and diversity in research activities allowed personalised professional learning and a no-blame environment for collaboration. Academics and social workers can take part on their own terms, work together in self-selecting groups where they may express and defend their views, and participate in a variety of challenging analytical and writing tasks. To practitioner researchers, CPRSW provided an egalitarian learning environment where there existed a safe space and social connectedness. However, academics expressed unsettling emotions in such an unfamiliar research environment, highlighting the need for a better understanding of these emotions, their causes and ways to critically reflect on them for making research practice near. Further research is necessary to explore how to convert this discomfort into a pedagogic resource for challenging stereotypes of the ‘others’ in social work learning and research.

Regarding the challenges of a networked approach to participatory practice research, key issues are the representation of the workforce and the ambiguous roles of academic researchers. While the network of self-selecting participants might not be representative of the social work workforce and the professional learning needs of those who do not/cannot participate. Membership of the network is fluid and can shrink or expand unexpectedly, which can affect the network’s scheduled work programme, leaving a question of who gets to take up the work left to be done. Building sufficient resources and human power into a CPRSW project is therefore essential for its success. Rethinking the roles of academics in this approach will be needed if we want to prepare academics better to enter this process and to enable them to see how their research skills and knowledge in theory could help give voice to tacit knowledge and practice wisdom, which are often unarticulated and unheard in social work literature ( Kong et al, 2021c ). The learnings from piloting CPRSW also point to the importance of building infrastructure, interactive space and skills for transdisciplinary learning, underpinned by the equal participation of multiple stakeholders, as part of the agenda for democratising social work practice research.

https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Participatory_Research_and_Social_Work_xls/22188823

This work was supported by the ESRC IAA and the BASW.

We would like to thank Angelic Quintana, Cherryl Pharoah, Diane Wills, Jane Shears, Kerry Sildatke, Wendy Roberts, Helen Charnley, Roger Smith, Sarah Banks and Susie Hawkes who collaborated with us in the Empowering Social Work during COVID-19 project and offered incredible insights into the lives of social workers in this trying time. Our gratitude is extended to those who completed the BASW Survey on Social Work during COVID-19. Without their contribution, our project and this article will not be possible.

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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Asset Mapping as a Research Tool for Community-Based Participatory Research in Social Work

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Elizabeth Lightfoot, Jennifer Simmelink McCleary, Terry Lum, Asset Mapping as a Research Tool for Community-Based Participatory Research in Social Work, Social Work Research , Volume 38, Issue 1, March 2014, Pages 59–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svu001

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Participatory research approaches such as community-based participatory research (CBPR) have emerged as an innovative way of conducting social work research. As social work researchers increasingly incorporate participatory approaches, they adopt and adapt research methods and procedures to fit participatory models. One such procedure, asset mapping, provides an appropriate method for conducting research and is particularly well suited to both the CBPR approach and social work's strengths-based approach to social issues. Although asset mapping as a community practice technique is not new to social work, it has been seldom used as a research tool in social work research and is generally not introduced as a research method in social work courses or in social work research textbooks.

Origins and Overview of Asset Mapping

Asset mapping is a method of research originally developed as part of Kretzmann and McKnight's (1993) asset-based community development (ABCD) strategy for community building and community capacity building. In the ABCD approach, a community explores, describes, and maps its assets and then uses these assets to develop solutions to a specific social issue within the community, such as homelessness, hunger, access to health care, or poverty. This approach shares commonalities with one of the dominant models in social work behavioral intervention, the strengths-based approach, that seeks to build on the strengths of individuals and families ( Saleebey, 1992). Similar to the strengths perspective, the asset approach to community development emphasizes the positive ability, capability, and capacity of communities to identify relevant issues; to develop appropriate solutions from the strengths of their community members, institutions, and structures; and to implement such solutions in a culturally appropriate, sustainable way. The asset approach differs from the more prominent deficit orientation to community development, which has historically focused on problems or risks of local communities that require professional resources and interventions ( Morgan & Ziglio, 2007).

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Social Work and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): Past, Present, and Future

• PMID: 35470395
• DOI: 10.1093/sw/swac016

The social work profession has made tremendous contributions to youth well-being, laying the foundation for social welfare systems and child protection laws. However, deficit-based constructions of youth are deeply engrained in the profession. Social work researchers have called for attention to critical approaches like youth participatory action research (YPAR). YPAR has an action-oriented epistemology and engages youth as coresearchers, providing an opportunity to shift social work research and practice paradigms. Yet, social work scholars lag behind cognate disciplines in adopting YPAR. This article examines challenges that have stymied YPAR in social work. The authors review the historical roots of the profession and its relationship to youth; examine present challenges, including social work's training and career progression; and make suggestions for the future, calling social work to affirm our values by reevaluating the way we do research on youth, the way we train future social workers, and the paradigms driving our practice.

Keywords: community engagement; participatory action research; youth; youth participatory action research (YPAR).

© 2022 National Association of Social Workers.

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Article contents

Community-based participatory research.

• Michael Duke Michael Duke University of California San Francisco
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.225
• Published online: 19 November 2020

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) refers to a methodological and epistemological approach to applied community projects in which researchers and community members collaborate as equals in the research process. Also known as participatory action research (PAR), CBPR has gained considerable acceptance both as a set of methods for identifying and addressing local issues of concern and as a vehicle for applying the principles of equity, cultural humility, mutual learning, and social justice to the relationships between researchers and communities. Although somewhat distinct from applied anthropology, CBPR shares with ethnography in particular an attentiveness to rapport building and community engagement and an overall validation of local knowledge. There is little consensus regarding the threshold of community participation necessary for a given research project to be considered CBPR. However, at a minimum the approach requires that community members define the problems to be assessed, provide consultation on the cultural and social dimensions of the study population, and serve in an advisory capacity over the entire project. The history of CBPR and its antecedents reflects its twin values as a pragmatic approach to researching and addressing local problems and as an emancipatory social justice project that seeks to diminish the hierarchical relationship between researchers and community members. Specifically, the pragmatic perspective was developed in the United States by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1930s (and subsequently by the anthropologists Laura Thompson and Sol Tax), while the emancipatory approach derives from the work of educational theorist Paulo Freire in Brazil in the 1970s. Community Advisory Boards (CABs) play an outsized role in the success of CBPR projects, since they typically represent the community in these studies, and thus maintain oversight over all aspects of the research process, including the study design, sampling and recruitment protocols, and the dissemination of findings. Accordingly, nurturing and maintaining trust between researchers, the CAB, and the community constitutes a foundational practice for any CBPR study.

• participatory action research
• engaged scholarship
• communities
• social justice
• research methods

Introduction

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) refers to research activities carried out in local settings in which community members actively collaborate with professionally trained researchers. CBPR is not linked to a particular academic field, but is instead utilized in a range of disciplines, particularly in the health and social sciences, community development, the humanities, and regional planning.

In applied anthropology and ethnography more generally, community studies nearly always involve some level of local involvement (e.g., working with gatekeepers to facilitate access to the target population). Furthermore, CBPR shares with ethnography both an emphasis on rapport-building as a central component of the research enterprise and an attentiveness to the collective perspectives and cultural understandings of community members (Arenas-Monreal, Cortez-Lugo, and Parada-Toro 2011 ; Batallan, Dente, and Ritta 2017 ). What distinguishes CBPR, however, is that community members provide critical oversight over these studies and participate actively in one or more aspects of the research process. These activities may include developing the study questions, designing the methodology, collecting data, and contributing to and disseminating the study findings (Balakrishnan and Claiborne 2017 ). Another way of considering the distinction between ethnography from CBPR, according to Cartwright and Schow ( 2016 ), is that while the conceptual focus of ethnography relies on the notion of the ethnographer gaining knowledge of a community setting by actively participating in the daily life of that community, in CBPR the goal is for community members to serve as participants in the research process.

Principles Characterizing CBPR

Regardless of discipline, characterizing CBPR precisely is challenging, at least in part because there is little consensus regarding the threshold of community participation necessary for a given research project to be considered CBPR. At a bare minimum, CBPR requires that community members define the problems to be assessed, provide consultation on the cultural and social dimensions of the study population, and, perhaps most critically, serve in an advisory capacity over the entire project, typically in the form of a community advisory board (Hacker 2013 ). Nonetheless, in a frequently cited review of the field, Israel and colleagues (Israel et al. 1998 ) identified several principles that should ideally characterize all CBPR initiatives. These principles include:

the recognition that community is recognized as a unit of identity;

drawing from community strengths and resources;

facilitating equitable partnerships and power-sharing arrangements;

promoting co-learning and capacity building among all partners;

achieving a mutually beneficial balance between research and action;

developing and maintaining partnerships through a cyclical and iterative process;

involving all partners in project dissemination; and sharing a long-term commitment to partnership sustainability.

Subsequently recognizing that the lion’s share of research occurs in community settings that are socially and economically marginalized, Israel and her colleagues, in a 2018 publication, identified an additional principle of CBPR: that the latter directly addresses issues of race, racism, and social class. As such, CBPR partners must strive to achieve the types of self-critique and self-reflection that together constitute cultural humility (Israel et al. 2018 ).

It is worth noting that, apart from ongoing engagement between researchers and community members, CBPR is not tied to any particular methodological approach. It is true that CBPR frequently includes a qualitative component. This emphasis is largely due to qualitative research’s epistemological emphasis on intersubjective knowledge creation and its methodological focus on capturing the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of participants through their own words and actions (Peralta and Murphy 2016 ). However, CBPR does not preclude the use of surveys, biological samples (bioassays), or other forms of quantitative data collection, provided that the community is actively engaged in those methodological decisions.

Collaboration between Researchers and the Community

The reasons for researchers and community members working collaboratively vary widely but tend to fall into two broad and overlapping categories. The first rationale is largely pragmatic, namely, that for some applied studies, methodologically sound community-researcher collaborations can yield more robust, contextualized data than projects where community member roles are limited to being research subjects (Calderón et al. 2018 ; Goodman, Thompson, and Hood 2018 ). An important reason why the outcome of CBPR projects tends to be so fruitful is because the participation of community collaborators as advisors and research team members may increase the participation of community members in the study and, at the end of the project, play a critical role in disseminating the study findings. More importantly, for applied studies in particular, community members in the aggregate typically possess intimate knowledge of the causes and consequences of the problems that afflict them and are therefore uniquely qualified for collaborating actively in formulating research questions and crafting study designs (Wallerstein et al. 2018 ). As a result, CBPR studies tend to provide multiple opportunities for documenting and interpreting local knowledge regarding community concerns and assets, as well as the experiences of community members. This understanding is important because it increases the likelihood that community members will support the study results and that the findings will be put to use for creating initiatives that bring about sustainable change. Last, CBPR provides opportunities for mutual capacity and skill building, harnessing financial resources for the community, and providing training and internship opportunities for students (Hacker 2013 ).

The second rationale for researchers and community members choosing to work together is based on principles of equity and social justice. In particular, CBPR is predicated on the idea that community members—who may be economically or socially marginalized—are experts in the conditions that affect them and the cultural and linguistic worlds in which they reside. From this perspective, CBPR has the effect of diminishing the hierarchical relationship between university-trained researchers and the communities with whom they work, quite apart from the research approach’s utility in answering particular research questions (Batallan et al. 2017 ; Dhungel et al. 2019 ; Vásquez-Fernández et al. 2018 ). Muhammad and colleagues ( 2014 ) go further, positing that CBPR cannot be successfully applied unless equal power relations are intentionally identified and addressed. The benefits of attending to these power relations are not only necessary for the successful implementation and completion of the project, but can have an emancipatory impact on both community members and research teams:

When the essential ideals of CBPR are faithfully adhered to, the community is better able to free itself from the social structural factors that have historically silenced its voices of concern and marginalized its aspirations for hope (i.e., colonization, racism, sexism, and economic exploitation). The academic researcher may likewise find release from personal and cultural biases that can develop through the achieved status of rigorous academic training; and through the ascribed status arising from individual power, privilege, and prestige accruing as an academic researcher. (Muhammad et al. 2014 , 1058)

Historical Development of Community-Based Participatory Research

The twin values of pragmatism and equity are reflected in the history of participatory research activities such that these values are sometimes considered to be distinct conceptual approaches to this method. Action research, a methodological and epistemological precursor to community-based participatory research (CBPR), is generally considered to have originated with Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist whose research beginning in the late 1930s focused on testing the impact of democratic participation in factories and community settings (Adelman 1993 ; Lewin 1946 ). These projects were notable for bringing together Lewin and his students, on the one hand, and members of the study population, on the other, to participate collaboratively in solving practical problems through the use of data. Although Lewin’s approach was subsequently put into practice by applied researchers in a number of disciplines, Laura Thompson is likely the first anthropologist to utilize this approach explicitly in her project on facilitating change in Hopi governance (Thompson 1950 ; Van Willigen 2002 ) (fig. 1 ).

Figure 1. Laura Thompson.

As an extension of action research, action anthropology developed largely through the so-called Fox Project, a University of Chicago field school among the Mesquakie people in rural Iowa led by Sol Tax. Largely through the influence of Tax’s students, the project was noteworthy for addressing issues of community self-determination, in part through the Mesquakie participating as co-investigators (Gearing 1988 ; Tax 1960 ).

Beginning in the 1970s, the term “action research” began to fall into disuse in favor of “participatory action research” and (somewhat later) “community-based participatory research.” In part, these shifts are semantic, emphasizing the participatory nature of the research enterprise. In addition, the change in nomenclature corresponded to a growing concern among researchers with foregrounding the structural conditions and relations of power that impact communities—including the power dynamics inherent to the research enterprise itself—and redefining the location of expert knowledge as residing in local communities. This latter perspective was strongly influenced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s influential concept of emancipator research (Freire [1970] 2018 ).

Friere’s approach stems from the assumption that, through facilitation by researchers, local communities can develop a critical consciousness regarding their material conditions. They can then harness that consciousness and the requisite knowledge that they already possess to formulate collective solutions to problems caused by these conditions. Emblematic of this approach is Columbian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda’s long-term collaborative history project with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (National Association of Tenant Farmers) on the country’s Caribbean coast. Fals Borda’s methodologically innovative approach to rewriting the history of the peasantry collaboratively “from below” resulted in Historia Doble de la Costa , an important four-volume work (Borda 2008 ; Robles Lomeli and Rappaport 2018 ). Some commentators have suggested that Lewin and Freire represent the two dominant historical strands of collaborative research: one developed in the Global North and focused on projects whose goal is to promote consensus and utilitarian solutions to local problems, the other developed in the Global South and concerned with collective research studies as vehicles for emancipation and for developing a critical consciousness of one’s experience (Hacker 2013 ; Wallerstein et al. 2018 ). These approaches are rarely mutually exclusive, however, as nearly all contemporary CBPR projects grapple at least implicitly with issues of power while engaging in solutions-focused projects that address community issues of interest.

Researchers, Communities, and Institutions

Academic research institutions represent important sites of power and often have an outsized impact—whether positive or negative—on the communities and regions in which they are embedded. As an important subcategory of community-based participatory research (CBPR), engaged scholarship seeks to create mutually beneficial partnerships between these institutions and local communities (Fitzgerald, Allen, and Roberts 2010 ). 1 Engaged scholarship utilizes the same methodological and epistemological approaches as other CBPR approaches. Engaged scholarship, however, is distinct in at least two ways. First, engaged scholarship researchers are formally affiliated with academic institutions, while CBPR investigators may be employed outside of university settings. Second, while CBPR emphasizes collaborative relationships between individual researchers (or teams of researchers) and communities, a particular focus of engaged scholarship is to promote linkages between academic institutions and communities. The primary goal of these linkages is to facilitate community-engaged research, civic engagement, community development, service learning, and improving community health and well-being (Norris-Tirrell, Lambert-Pennington, and Hyland 2010 ). Indicative of the growing acceptance of engaged scholarship—and by extension CBPR—in academic institutions is the fact that these approaches have entered the Carnegie classification system for universities (Giles, Sandmann, and Saltmarsh 2010 ) (fig. 2 ).

Figure 2. Katherine Lambert-Pennington and a farmer from Santa Maria di Licodia talk about water and irrigation practices past and present during the “Rural-Ability” Community Environmental Planning and Development (CoPED) program in June 2018.

There is a tendency in CBPR and engaged scholarship literatures to view these approaches as bridging two distinct, mutually exclusive worlds: those of the researchers and those of the communities in which they work. And, indeed, researchers’ and community members’ motivations, goals, and rewards relative to the research process may be quite different. For investigators, the research may provide a vehicle for obtaining grant funding, providing data for publications, and facilitating tenure or other forms of job promotion; for community members, in contrast, the research may be seen as a mechanism for understanding local issues of concern in-depth and for using the resulting data in grant applications to address that issue (Hacker 2013 ; Muhammad et al. 2014 ).

However, while it is true that the positions of researchers and community members are often distinct, a growing number of academically trained researchers come from the same historically marginalized underrepresented groups that characterize the communities where CBPR takes place and have therefore incorporated culturally salient methodologies into these studies (Chilisa 2012 ; Tuhiwai Smith 2012 ). Furthermore, CBPR study designs often include training community members as researchers, further blurring the distinction between the investigator and the local population. For example, CBPR approaches like photovoice, journaling, and similar methodologies in which community members are trained to document and reflect upon particular social, structural, or public health-related issues serve to democratize the research process by incorporating community members into the research team (Batallan et al. 2017 ; Schensul 2014 ; Sitter 2017 ). 2 Finally, in much of the literature focusing on the distinction between researchers and community members, the researchers are typically characterized as being employed in academic settings. However, Schensul points to the proliferation of third-sector scientists (anthropologists and other social researchers working outside of university settings) and community-based research organizations, both of which call into question the notion of the university as the sole site of scientific production and dissemination (Schensul 2010 ).

The question of how a community is conceptualized and demarcated both emically and etically has long been a pressing issue for anthropologists and others who carry out research with local populations. This interest stems from the fact that communities, which may seem relatively homogeneous to outsiders, often contain substantial internal diversity which can, in turn, manifest in factionalism or other forms of division. This issue is even more acute for CBPR (Blumenthal 2011 ), since aligning a research project with a particular community faction may unintentionally exacerbate inequality within that community (Minkler 2004 ; Mitchell and Baker 2005 ). Furthermore, the proliferation of online communities and other electronic forms of communication—and the forms of identity that emerge from them—have effectively decoupled the relationship between communities and specific geographic spaces (Balakrishnan and Claiborne 2017 ). Given that community spaces may no longer be synonymous with particular localities and because social beings identify with multiple communities based on affect, affiliation, or shared interest, Israel and colleagues utilize the term “communities of identity” to refer to those populations with whom CBPR approaches seek to engage and collaborate (Israel et al. 2018 ).

Community Advisory Boards in Community-Based Participatory Research Practice

In community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches, the community is typically represented by a coalition such as a community advisory board (CAB) (Blumenthal 2011 ). CABs serve a number of purposes. First, members of the CAB function as the interface between researchers and the community. In this respect, they act as the de facto community representatives for the project and are responsible for providing the critical oversight necessary to ensure that community wishes and expectations are met (Morris 2011 ). Second, as people with deep knowledge of the community, cultural and social resources they hold, and the problems they face, CABs serve as expert panels (LeCompte et al. 1999 ). Third, in their capacity as key informants or local experts, CAB members play a substantial role in working with the researcher to identify the problems that need to be addressed and in developing study questions and methodological approaches for understanding those problems (LeCompte et al. 1999 ). Fourth, among the most important roles of CABs is identifying potential research participants and facilitating their recruitment into the study (Hacker 2013 ). Relatedly, CAB members can help identify the presence and location of community members who have particular demographic or other salient characteristics of the target population, including those who are otherwise hard to reach (Flicker, Guta, and Travers 2018 ). Also, to the extent that CAB members have credibility in the community, their service in an advisory capacity gives the study local credibility, which increases the likelihood of participation. Last, the CAB plays an important role in the dissemination of the project findings within the community and in the development of an action plan that may result from the study conclusions (Lopez et al. 2017 ).

Building trust between researchers, the CAB, and the community constitutes a foundational practice for any CBPR study, particularly in cases where communities have had negative experiences with researchers or institutions where they work (Andrews, Ybarra, and Matthews 2013 ). However, the processes that lead to relationships of trust and mutual respect are poorly understood, in part due to a tendency in the literature to view trust in binary terms. This tendency is unfortunate, since the development and nurturance of mutually respectful and beneficial relationships between communities and researchers are arguably the cornerstone for any community-based research project. In response to this concern, Lucero and colleagues offer an evidence-based typology of trust in community–researcher partnerships (Lucero, Wright, and Reese 2018 , 63) (Table 1 ). Rather than being static, the model reflects the fact that levels of trust do not necessarily begin with an absence of trust and that levels of trust may change over time. The model therefore serves as a tool for members of these partnerships to reflect critically upon the degree of trust present at any given moment in the project and to be proactive in seeking opportunities to foster and maintain mutual trust.

Table 1. Trust Typology Model with Characteristics

Source : Lucero et al. ( 2018 , 63).

Because of the critical relationship between CABs and researchers in CBPR projects and the importance of trust in sustaining these partnerships, the format and facilitation of those meetings and other forms of internal communication are especially important (Andrews et al. 2010 ). However, best practices regarding communication have been only sporadically documented (see Newman et al. 2011 ). An important strategy entails incorporating open discussions between the researcher and the CAB regarding the structure, purpose, intention, and processes of communication. This strategy is particularly pertinent to formal meetings, which can otherwise have the unintended effect of perpetuating hierarchical relationships between researchers and community members (Newman et al. 2011 ). For this reason, collectively developing and approving meeting agendas to ensure that the topics for discussion address issues of concern for all members of the partnership, including formal opportunities for rapport-building, is a useful strategy. Furthermore, it is important to identify a facilitator from within the group who can ensure that attendees feel free to speak candidly and that the issues raised by partnership members are adequately addressed.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is based fundamentally on principles of reciprocity, equity, and collaboration, which distinguishes it from other forms of social research. It is therefore predicated not only on the ethical treatment of research participants—which is the goal of most research involving human beings—but on engendering social justice, empowerment, and egalitarianism at the community level through the research process itself. CBPR is not immune from ethical concerns, however. In part, these concerns are structural, since institutional review boards—which assess ethical issues in scientific research—are often poorly equipped to address the fluid and emergent interactions and approaches that tend to characterize CBPR. More directly, because CBPR, like ethnography, depends so strongly on rapport and relationship-building interactions and activities, scholars are beginning to focus on the everyday ethics of CBPR (Banks et al. 2013 ; Flicker et al. 2018 ). Banks and colleagues, for example, identify six broad themes pertaining to the ethical challenges of CBPR:

Partnership, collaboration, and power (i.e., the ways in which research partnerships are established, power is distributed, and control is exercised);

Blurring role boundaries (i.e., between researcher and researched, academic and activist);

Community rights, conflict, and democratic representation (i.e., the ethical challenges of defining community);

Ownership and dissemination of data, findings, and publications (i.e., who takes credit for the findings, and how should the findings be disseminated?);

Anonymity, privacy, and confidentiality (i.e., when community members collect and analyze research from their neighbors);

Institutional ethical review processes (which typically draw sharp distinctions between researchers and participants and assume that the researcher is in charge of the research enterprise) (Banks et al. 2013 ).

Each of these dimensions is important to consider because the consequences of failing to mindfully reflect upon the ethical questions that are more or less unique to CBPR during each stage of the research can ultimately have a detrimental impact on the partnership, the community, and the project itself (Minkler 2004 ). As Eikeland observes:

(W)ho is to be involved; how and why; who makes decisions and how; whose interpretations are to prevail and why; how do we write about and publish on people involved; who owns the ideas developed; etc. . . .The consequences of letting such questions pass unattended may be—intended or not—the spontaneous, habitual emergence of subtle power structures on a micro-level, not clearly visible in the beginning, but accumulating and “petrifying” over time into larger unwanted patterns. (Eikeland 2006 , 39)

Barriers to Successful Community-Based Participatory Research Projects

Although community-based participatory research (CBPR) provides a fertile conceptual and methodological framework for collaboratively directed community research, advocacy, and development, the approach also contains several impediments that have prevented the approach from being as widespread as it may otherwise be. Chief among these are time and money (Brydon-Miller 2008 ; Giles and Giles 2012 ; Lake and Wendland 2018 ). Establishing and maintaining successful collaborative relationships between researchers and community members can be time-consuming, especially initially when bonds of mutual trust may be at their most fragile. Apart from those relatively few universities that are deeply committed to the principles of engaged scholarship, academic institutions rarely reward, much less acknowledge, these time commitments (Arrieta et al. 2017 ; Giles and Giles 2012 ). Conversely, community-based organizations (CBOs) are often understaffed and their personnel strapped for time in attending to immediate community needs. It can therefore be difficult for CBO leaders and staff to invest the time to establish authentic partnerships without outside researchers. Furthermore, grant funding rarely provides resources for partnership development, nor for funding efforts to collaboratively develop research questions and methodologies; on the contrary, a tightly structured research design at the time of submission is nearly always a requirement for successful grant applications. Furthermore, research funders almost invariably recognize the lead investigator’s institution as the fiscal agent, with community organizations assigned the role of subcontractor. This fiscal arrangement not only reinforces the unequal status of CBOs relative to academic institutions (Lake and Wendland 2018 ), but makes the latter in a sense dependent on the university and its bureaucratic processes for reimbursement. Last, although community–researcher partnerships are the key to successful CBPR projects, they are difficult to maintain after the funding for a particular project has ended. Although some institutions offer bridge funding to researchers who are between projects, these resources are seldom available to community collaborators, making it all the more difficult for the latter to participate actively in partnership maintenance and new project development.

In addition to barriers related to time and resources, CBPR, like ethnography, has been the subject of several forms of critique. First, despite the fact that the value if this approach is increasingly recognized by funders and scholars in multiple disciplines, CBPR can be perceived as lacking objectivity because representatives of the community in which the study takes place actively collaborate in the research. However, Calderón and colleagues argue that successful CBPR projects must be at least as rigorous as more traditional approaches in order to advance the community-oriented social justice agendas that are among the key goals of these projects (Calderón et al. 2018 ). A second critique, again shared with those of ethnography, is that CBPR studies lack external validity in the sense that the findings may not be generalizable to other community settings (Hacker 2013 ). However, Wallerstein and Duran note that CBPR can facilitate the external validity of existing interventions since community members and researchers partner to adapt those interventions to local cultural, social, and political contexts (Wallerstein and Duran 2010 ).

Despite its numerous challenges, community-based participatory research (CBPR) provides a valuable theoretical, epistemological, and methodological framework for communities and researchers to document and interpret local issues of concern collectively and in-depth, and to use that information to develop community-driven initiatives for addressing these problems. Equally important, CBPR offers a transformative approach to community engagement and to researcher–community partnerships in particular by reducing the hierarchical relationships between research institutions and local communities and situating the research itself as an arena for dialogue, reflection, mutual learning, and social action. Put another way, CBPR may be considered not only a methodological and epistemological approach to understanding the issues facing community members, but a social movement to democratize knowledge production on a global scale (Schensul 2010 ). As a field that likewise privileges local knowledge and considers community members to be content experts, anthropology provides a fertile ground for the development and advancement of these critical approaches. Because of this shared perspective and because of the growing acceptance of this approach by funders, researchers, and community members themselves, students preparing for a career as applied anthropologists would be well-advised to seek out opportunities to incorporate CBPR into their theoretical and methodological toolkits.

Further Reading

Olav Eikeland’s brief, though widely cited article on ethics and community partnerships provides an important discussion of the limitations of conventional research ethics as applied to CBPR and the ways in which the “othering effects” of this ethical framework may imperil successful community–researcher collaborations.

• Eikeland, Olav . 2006. “Condescending Ethics and Action Research: Extended Review Article.” Action Research 4 (1): 37–47.

The CBPR Engage for Equity project (Nina Wallerstein, Principal Investigator) at the University of New Mexico has produced a wealth of tools and resources pertaining to CBPR and community–researcher partnerships. See CBPR Engage for Equity .

Karen Hacker’s handbook of CBPR methods is considered a classic in the field.

• Hacker, Karen . 2013. Community-Based Participatory Research . London: SAGE.

Michael Muhammad and colleagues provide an in-depth discussion on a key issue in the CBPR literature, namely, the relationship between positionality and power as these apply to researchers, community collaborators, and research participants.

• Muhammad, Michael , Bonnie Duran , Lorenda Belone , Nina Wallerstein , Magdalena Avila , and Andrew L. Sussman . 2014. “Reflections on Researcher Identity and Power: The Impact of Positionality on Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Processes and Outcomes.” Critical Sociology 41 (7–8): 1045–1063.

Jean Schensul’s Malinowski Lecture presents a clear-eyed view of the emancipatory possibilities of engaged research and the critical role of anthropologists in advancing this agenda.

• Schensul, Jean . 2010. “2010 Malinowski Award: Engaged Universities, Community Based Research Organizations and Third Sector Science in a Global System.” Human Organization 69 (4): 307–320.
• Adelman, Clem . 1993. “Kurt Lewin and the Origins of Action Research.” Educational Action Research 1 (1): 7–24.
• Andrews, Jeannette O. , Susan D. Newman , Otha Meadows , Melissa J. Cox , and Shelia Bunting . 2010. “Partnership Readiness for Community-Based Participatory Research.” Health Education Research 27 (4): 555–571.
• Andrews, Tracy J. , Vickie Ybarra , and L. Lavern Matthews . 2013. “For the Sake of Our Children: Hispanic Immigrant and Migrant Families’ Use of Folk Healing and Biomedicine.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27 (3): 385–413.
• Arenas-Monreal, Luz , Marlene Cortez-Lugo , and Irene M. Parada-Toro . 2011. “ Community-Based Participatory Research and the Escuela de Salud Pública in Mexico .” Public Health Reports 126 (3): 436–440.
• Arrieta, Martha I. , Leevones Fisher , Thomas Shaw , Valerie Bryan , Christopher R. Freed , Roma Stovall Hanks , Andrea Hudson , et al. 2017. “Consolidating the Academic End of a Community-Based Participatory Research Venture to Address Health Disparities.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 21 (3): 113–134.
• Balakrishnan, Vishalache , and Lise Claiborne . 2017. “ Participatory Action Research in Culturally Complex Societies: Opportunities and Challenges .” Educational Action Research 25 (2): 185–202.
• Banks, Sarah , Andrea Armstrong , Kathleen Carter , Helen Graham , Peter Hayward , Alex Henry , Tessa Holland , et al. 2013. “ Everyday Ethics in Community-Based Participatory Research .” Contemporary Social Science 3: 263.
• Batallan, Graciela1 , Liliana Dente , and Loreley Ritta . 2017. “ Anthropology, Participation, and the Democratization of Knowledge: Participatory Research Using Video with Youth Living in Extreme Poverty .” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30 (5): 464–473.
• Blumenthal, Daniel S. 2011. “Is Community-Based Participatory Research Possible?” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 40 (3): 386.
• Borda, Orlando Fals . 2008. “The Application of the Social Sciences’ Contemporary Issues to Work on Participatory Action Research.” Human Organization 67 (4): 359.
• Brydon-Miller, Mary . 2008. “Ethics and Action Research: Deepening Our Commitment to Principles of Social Justice and Redefining Systems of Democratic Practice.” In The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice , edited by Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury , 199–210. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Calderón, José , Mark R. Warren , Gregory Squires , Celina Su , and Luke Aubry Kupscznk . 2018. “ Is Collaborative, Community-Engaged Scholarship More Rigorous Than Traditional Scholarship? On Advocacy, Bias, and Social Science Research .” Urban Education 53 (4): 445–472.
• Cartwright, Elizabeth , and Diana Schow . 2016. “Anthropological Perspectives on Participation in CBPR: Insights from the Water Project, Maras, Peru.” Qualitative Health Research 26 (1): 136–140.
• Chilisa, Bagele . 2012. Indigenous Research Methodologies . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Dhungel, Rita , Shanti Lama , Auska Khadka , K. C. Sharda , Mendo Sherpa , Pratima Limbu , Ghaynu Limbu , Monika Rai , and Sweata Shrestha . 2019. “ Hearing Our Voices: Pathways from Oppression to Liberation through Community-Based Participatory Research .” Space and Culture, India 6 (5): 39–55.
• Eikeland, Olav . 2006. “ Condescending Ethics and Action Research: Extended Review Article .” Action Research 4 (1): 37–47.
• Fitzgerald, Hiram E. , Angela Allen , and Peggy Roberts . 2010. “Community-Campus Partnerships: Perspectives on Engaged Research.” In Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions . Vol. 2. Community-Campus Partnerships , edited by Hiram E. Fitzgerald , Cathy Burack , and Sarena D. Seifer , 5–28. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
• Flicker, Sara , Adrian Guta , and Robb Travers . 2018. “Everyday Challenges in the Life Cycle of CBPR: Broadening Our Bandwidth on Ethics.” In Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity , edited by Nina Wallerstein , Bonnie Duran , John Oetzel , and Meredith Minkler , 227–236. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Freire, Paulo . (1970) 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . New York: Bloomsbury.
• Gearing, Frederick O. 1988. The Face of the Fox . Sheffield, WI: Sheffield.
• Giles, Dwight E. Jr. , Lorilee R. Sandmann , and John Saltmarsh . 2010. “Engagement and the Carnegie Classification System.” In Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions . Vol. 2. Community-Campus Partnerships , edited by Hiram E. Fitzgerald , Cathy Burack , and Sarena D. Seifer , 149–160. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
• Giles, Hollyce , and Sherry Giles . 2012. “Negotiating the Boundary between the Academy and the Community.” In The Engaged Campus , edited by Dan W. Butin and Scott Seider , 49–67. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Goodman, Melody S. , Vetta Sanders Thompson , and Sula Hood . 2018. “ Community-Based Participatory Research .” In Public Health Research Methods for Partnerships and Practice , edited by Melody S. Goodman and Vetta Sanders Thompson , 1–22. London: Routledge.
• Israel, Barbara A. , Amy J. Schulz , Edith A. Parker , and Adam B. Becker . 1998. “ Review of Community-Based Research: Assessing Partnership Approaches to Improve Public Health .” Annual Review of Public Health 19 (1): 173–202.
• Israel, Barbara A. , Amy J. Schulz , Edith A. Parker , Adam B. Becker , Alex J. Allen III , J. Ricardo Guzman , and Richard Lichtenstein . 2018. “Critical Issues in Developing and Following CBPR Principals.” In Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity , edited by Nina Wallerstein , Bonnie Duran , John Oetzel , and Meredith Minkler , 3rd ed., 31–44. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Lake, Danielle , and Joel Wendland . 2018. “Practical, Epistemological, and Ethical Challenges of Participatory Action Research: A Cross-Disciplinary Review of the Literature.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 22 (3): 11–42.
• LeCompte, Margaret D. , Jean J. Schensul , Margaret Weeks , and Merrill Singer . 1999. The Ethnographer’s Toolkit . Vol. 6. Researcher Roles and Research Partnerships . Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
• Lewin, Kurt . 1946. “Action Research and Minority Problems.” Journal of Social Issues 2 (4): 34–46.
• Lopez, William D. , Daniel J. Kruger , Jorge Delva , Mikel Llanes , Charo Ledón , Adreanne Waller , Melanie Harner , et al. 2017. “ Health Implications of an Immigration Raid: Findings from a Latino Community in the Midwestern United States .” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 19 (3): 702–708.
• Lucero, Julie E. , Katherine E. Wright , and Abigail Reese . 2018. “Trust Development in CBPR Partnerships.” In Community Based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity , edited by Nina Wallerstein , Bonnie Duran , John Oetzel , and Meredith Minkler , 3rd ed., 61–71. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Minkler, Meredith . 2004. “Ethical Challenges for the Outside Researcher in Community-Based Participatory Research.” Health Education & Behavior 31 (6): 684.
• Mitchell, Terry Leigh , and Emerance Baker . 2005. “Community-Building versus Career-Building Research: The Challenges, Risks, and Responsibilities of Conducting Research with Aboriginal and Native American Communities.” Journal of Cancer Education 20: 41–46.
• Morris, Chad T. 2011. “ Assessing and Achieving Diversity of Participation in the Grant-Inspired Community-Based Public Health Coalition .” Annals of Anthropological Practice 35 (2): 43–65.
• Muhammad, Michael , Bonnie Duran , Lorenda Belone , Nina Wallerstein , Magdalena Avila , and Andrew L. Sussman . 2014. “ Reflections on Researcher Identity and Power: The Impact of Positionality on Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Processes and Outcomes .” Critical Sociology 41 (7–8): 1045–1063.
• Newman, Susan D. , Jeannette O. Andrews , Gayenell S. Magwood , Carolyn Jenkins , Melissa J. Cox , and Deborah C. Williamson . 2011. “Community Advisory Boards in Community-Based Participatory Research: A Synthesis of Best Processes.” Preventing Chronic Disease 8 (3): A70.
• Norris-Tirrell, D. , K. Lambert-Pennington , and S. Hyland . 2010. “ Embedding Service Learning in Engaged Scholarship at Research Institutions to Revitalize Metropolitan Neighborhoods .” Journal of Community Practice 18 (2–3): 171–189.
• Peralta, Karie Jo , and John W. Murphy . 2016. “Community-Based Participatory Research and the Co-Construction of Community Knowledge.” Qualitative Report 21 (9): 1713–1726.
• Robles Lomeli , Jafte Dilean , and Joanne Rappaport . 2018. “ Imagining Latin American Social Science from the Global South: Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research .” Latin American Research Review 53 (3): 597.
• Schensul, Jean . 2010. “ 2010 Malinowski Award Engaged Universities, Community Based Research Organizations and Third Sector Science in a Global System .” Human Organization 69 (4): 307–320.
• Schensul, Jean J. 2014. “Youth Participatory Action Research.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research , Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Sitter, Kathleen C. 2017. “Taking a Closer Look at Photovoice as a Participatory Action Research Method.” Journal of Progressive Human Services 28 (1): 36–48.
• Tax, Sol . 1960. “The Fox Project.” Human Organization 17: 17–19.
• Thompson, Laura . 1950. “Action Research among American Indians.” Scientific Monthly 70: 34–40.
• Tuhiwai Smith, Linda . 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples . 2nd ed. London: Zed Books.
• Van Willigen, John . 2002. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction . Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
• Vásquez-Fernández, Andrea M. , John L. Innes , Robert A. Kozak , Reem Hajjar , María I. Shuñaqui Sangama , Raúl Sebastián Lizardo , and Miriam Pérez Pinedo . 2018. “Co-Creating and Decolonizing a Methodology Using Indigenist Approaches: Alliance with the Asheninka and Yine-Yami Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 17 (3): 720–749.
• Wallerstein, Nina , Bonnie Duran , John Oetzel , and Meredith Minkler . 2018. Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity . 3rd ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Wallerstein, Nina , and Bonnie Duran . 2010. “Community-Based Participatory Research Contributions to Intervention Research: The Intersection of Science and Practice to Improve Health Equity.” American Journal of Public Health 100 (supp. 1): S40–S46.

1. I am grateful to Stanley Hyland for making explicit the connection between engaged scholarship and CBPR.

2. Photovoice is a data collection approach in which community members are asked to document via photography or videography an issue facing their communities.

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Faculty uses classroom to expand flood recovery efforts in Eastern Kentucky

• Published May 6, 2024
• College News , Featured News , Research News

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Lexington, Kentucky (May 6 th , 2024) – In an educational endeavor that merges scholarly research with pragmatic crisis management, Drs. Natalie Pope and Diane Loeffler have harnessed recovery efforts in the aftermath of the 2022 Eastern Kentucky floods into a transformative learning experience at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work (CoSW).

Loeffler and Pope are currently working on the following study, “Exploring the Experiences of Providing Services to Communities Affected by Natural Disaster.” This qualitative project is focused on learning from leaders within the non-profit and volunteer sector – looking specifically at how these service providers and their respective organizations have worked within affected Kentucky communities on flood relief efforts.

The 2022 flood in Eastern Kentucky was a catastrophic event that damaged/destroyed over 9,000 homes across several counties in Appalachian Kentucky. “Our work seeks to understand how leaders responded and how organizations have shifted to prioritize flood recovery related work,” Loeffler shared.

This study ventures beyond the statistics, uncovering the strategies and sacrifices of service providers at the forefront of flood relief operations. Its findings are anticipated to distill the core themes and valuable insights that emerge from the leaders’ responses and organizational adaptation to disaster relief.

What distinguishes this project is its immersive design. Dr. Pope embedded the study into her doctoral level Intro to Qualitative Research course, effectively enlisting her nine students (Ph.D. students from across campus) as co-investigators.

“This is not just about teaching research methods; it’s about applying them in real-time, community-based way,” said Dr. Pope. “This initiative has allowed students to contribute to the study conceptualization, conduct qualitative interviews, and contribute to preliminary data analysis, providing a rare experiential learning opportunity.”

The project is further enhanced by an artistic touch – each student created a ‘found poem’ from their interview transcripts. “The found poems are a powerful way to present our findings. They bring the experiences of these community leaders to life, providing emotive insights into the challenges they faced during the floods,” Dr. Pope explained.

“What we’re creating here is a mosaic of resilience and adaptation,” said Loeffler. “Our students are learning that research is not just about numbers and data; it’s about stories, emotions, and the human spirit overcoming adversity.”

This unique approach underscores the college’s dedication to providing an education that extends far beyond the confines of a classroom, emphasizing the real-world application of academic expertise to support local communities in need.

For 85 years, the University of Kentucky College of Social Work (CoSW) has been a leader in social work education. As a college, we promote community and individual well-being through translational research and scholarship, exemplary teaching, and vital community engagement. We are committed to the people and social institutions throughout Kentucky, the nation, and the world. Like the University, CoSW is an organization that cultivates a diverse academic community characterized by interpersonal fairness and social justice. We are fiercely committed to developing outstanding social work professionals — leaders who will serve individuals, families, and communities through innovative and effective practices that are guided by cultural competency, systematic ethical analysis, and a keen and pragmatic understanding of the human condition.  

UK College of Social Work paints “Rachel’s Room” in honor of former CoSW student

‘Behind the Blue’: UK grad finds passion for global social work through Explore First

UK College of Social Work honors 2024 graduating class on Friday

• May 6, 2024

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School of social work honors change makers at 2024 homecoming.

April 29, 2024

In a vibrant celebration of innovation, advocacy, and compassionate service, the University of Maryland School of Social Work celebrated its distinguished alumni at the annual Alumni Association Awards Ceremony during the school’s 2024 Homecoming on March 8. The event showcased an impressive assembly of social work professionals whose transformative efforts are reshaping communities and healing lives.

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