Abstract
This article is part of the series on African primary care research and focuses on participatory action research. The article gives an overview of the emancipatory-critical research paradigm, the key characteristics and different types of participatory action research. Following this it describes in detail the methodological issues involved in professional participatory action research and running a cooperative inquiry group. The article is intended to help students with writing their research proposal.
Highlights
Participatory action research (PAR) is suited to the primary care context, because of its tradition of working with communities, and because of its ability to improve clinical practice.[1,2] Primary care services, by their nature, are close to the communities that they serve and questions often arise regarding how to work with community groups in order to address the underlying determinants of ill health
Professional PAR works with professionals who want to change their practice and has been embraced by both the educational and health sectors
The facilitator of the group is usually the initiating researcher who will function as a group member and participate in the action-reflection process
Summary
PAR is an iterative process between action and research.[5,6,7] On the one hand, action requires one to put one’s learning into practice, whilst research requires one to reflect and clarify what one has learnt from this experience and to develop new theory and propositional knowledge that is incorporated into new action It is participatory and always involves working with rather than on people. Professional PAR works with professionals who want to change their practice and has been embraced by both the educational and health sectors Examples of this within the health sector include a group of general practitioners http://www.phcfm.org doi:10.4102/phcfm.v6i1.585. This is often a ‘How to ...’ question, for example, ‘How to improve the annual review of people with diabetes in community health centres?’ The research question often arises out of an awareness of the problems encountered in clinical practice – for example, why so many patients with diabetes are controlled poorly
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