Beyond Doing No Harm: A Call for Participatory Action Research with Marginalized Populations in Criminological Research

Abstract

While most social scientists agree that the outcome of research should be useful in the real world, the idea that research can, and should, be empowering and directly useful to research participants has largely been limited to the margins of a few social science disciplines. While community psychologists and critical sociologists have long embraced participatory research and co-operative inquiry approaches—where the empowerment of research participants is as important as the contribution to knowledge and policy development—criminologists have been slow to adopt more emancipatory research models except for a few notable exceptions. This essay calls for the use of participatory action research by criminologists and for us to have a dialogue about the social value of our research and our obligations to research participants beyond “simply doing no harm.”