Community-based Participatory Action Research Project Research Articles

Mental Health First Aid for Black Populations: Recommendations From the Neighborhood Healers Project

Community-based participatory action research can facilitate counseling psychologists’ engagement in social justice to benefit Black people’s mental health. One way to improve Black mental health is to equip credible and trustworthy community members with mental health knowledge and skills to support other community members experiencing mental health challenges. This study presents the Neighborhood Healers Project—a community-based participatory action research project that trains Black adults (Neighborhood Healers Fellows) in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). During the inaugural 12-month fellowship year, we collected longitudinal qualitative data from N = 20 Fellows on the relevance of MHFA to Black people. In this paper, we examined their responses using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings included two themes with affiliated subthemes: (a) Liberatory Paradigm Shift and (b) For Us By Us: Culturally Relevant Curriculum. We conclude with implications for counseling psychologists.

Concevoir un centre alimentaire communautaire pour favoriser la sécurité alimentaire

Objective: The objective of this community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) project was to gain an in-depth understanding of the needs, interest and opportunities that exist within a post-secondary institution with respect to supporting food security among students via a food hub. Methods: The project was undertaken on the campus of the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. The CBPAR approach included 4 phases: 1) information gathering, 2) relationship development, 3) implementation of the community engagement strategy, and 4) shareback of findings to the community. Results: Phase 1 identified key components that formed the research process including campus partners for relationship development (phase 2) and subsequent engagement through their networks (phase 3). Phase 3 included engagement of 62, 111, 156, and 154 students, who participated in facilitated dialogues, community meals, a survey and targeted survey, respectively. Food insecurity related experiences were prevalent, with 37% to 75% indicating they worried about running out of food in the last year. Over 90% of all survey respondents affirmed that they would access a community food hub (CFH). Preferences for the CFH were inclusion of emergency food access, community meals, and financial support and planning, while prioritizing foods that meet cultural needs, and a low cost grocery store within the CFH. Conclusion: There is a demonstrated need and desire among students for innovative approaches to support food security at a post-secondary institution. The process outlined may serve as a road map for other communities who are seeking to move beyond emergency food relief.

Beyond individual responsibility towards healthy food choices: A qualitative study among Pakistani women in Hong Kong

While biomedical understandings of food and diet coupled with discourses on individual responsibility towards healthy food choices are nowadays prominent, other social and cultural meanings attached to food and diet are largely devalued. The limits of such a reductionist approach are more evident when related to the experiences of migrant and ethnic populations, whose alternative knowledge(s) and practices about food and health are especially neglected. A multicultural city with a public healthcare system inherited from the British colonial times and largely shaped by biomedical ideas of health, Hong Kong offers a lens into the limits of such a reductionist approach. Due to their vulnerability in the context of Hong Kong as shaped by intersecting social identities, 72 women from Pakistan were recruited to be our community partners in a community-based participatory action research project to investigate their health needs and concerns. 12 focus group discussions were conducted, exploring their experiences of “healthy” food and overweight especially related to their encounters with the Hong Kong public healthcare system, as these issues emerged as key health concerns within the community. Four major themes emerged: unmet expectations of care, health is beyond the individual, constraints to a healthy diet in the context of migration, and beyond health: food as care for diasporic women. This study highlights the limit of a reductionist approach to healthy food as merely based on nutrition and individual responsibility. It stresses the need of a counter-discourse in the field of public health, emphasizing not only alternative cultural ideas of health and food, but also enlarging the field of health in biomedical terms to embrace “care” and acknowledging the structural constraints shaping migrant and ethnic population's vulnerability in making “healthy” food choices.

Raids at Work: Latinx Immigrant Labor Precarity and the Spectacle of ICE Worksite Enforcement Raids

Why does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conduct worksite raids when employers are rarely ever charged with hiring undocumented immigrant workers? This article shows how exploitative labor conditions and ICE worksite enforcement raids exist in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that (re)produces precarity for undocumented workers. Analysis of interviews from the Immigrant Workers Project (IWP) Survey of 2018, a community-based participatory action research project in Northeast Ohio, reveals that individuals directly and indirectly impacted by ICE worksite raids understand and experience these operations within the broader context of anti-immigrant labor discrimination and worker exploitation. Although previous scholarship has theorized the role of “spectacle” in various aspects of immigration enforcement a critical analysis of media coverage, public records, and government documents shows how government agencies and the media choreograph worksite raids for maximum public spectacle. The underlying logics of this immigration enforcement tactic highlight how undocumented immigrant workers exist simultaneously as individuals whose labor is deregulated but whose presence is hyper-regulated.

LGBTQ+ OLDER ADULTS AND COMMUNITY NEEDS IN METRO DETROIT: ADAPTING METHODS TO EVOLVING CONDITIONS

Abstract Gerontological researchers have long called for more research on diverse older adults, including diverse communities of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans*/queer+ (LGBTQ+) older adults (e.g., race/ethnicity, economic status, religion). This paper identifies lessons learned from a community-based participatory action research (CBPR) project with LGBTQ+ older adults across four counties. Initiated by LGBTQ+ older adults of color and transgender older adults concerned about access to affordable and culturally responsive housing as they age, researchers worked with a coalition of 8 LGBTQ+ focused organizations to design, implement, and analyze a mostly online survey (n=270). Topics include: Capturing diverse perspectives in survey design (8 focus groups, N=35); addressing external threats to data integrity; implementing multiple types of outreach in phases to expand participant diversity; and working with the coalition and other partners through different stages of survey design, recruitment, data analysis, and identification/enactment of goals for change informed by data, while also navigating a pandemic.

Conversation books for improving social interaction and social acceptance of children with complex communication needs in India

Introduction: This study draws on data from a community-based participatory action research project conducted to develop and evaluate a communication partner training program for supporting parents of children with complex communication needs in South India. Method: The article focuses on one participant with cerebral palsy and his mother. The participant child’s communicative participation and social interaction opportunities were enriched using a conversation book co-constructed by him, his mother, and the trainer-researcher speech-language pathologist during the training program. Data were collected throughout the action research project, including interviews, group meetings, observations, and a trainer-researcher journal. Results and discussion: Applied thematic analysis was employed to analyze the longitudinal data, in order to highlight the changes in the participant child’s social interaction and communicative participation. By describing the process of developing the conversation book as a means of increasing communication and social interaction opportunities for the child, our data illustrate how personalized low-tech augmentative and alternative communication options can be a way to improve social participation for children with disabilities in culturally diverse and low resource contexts, where stigma toward disability provides significant obstacles to social inclusion.

The TECC Clinic: An innovative resource for mitigating technology-enabled coercive control

This article describes the development and preliminary evaluation of the Seattle-based Technology-Enabled Coercive Control (TECC) Clinic, a free consultative clinic that pairs a volunteer technologist, trained in the dynamics of coercive control, with a survivor experiencing TECC. One of the first support services of its kind, the TECC Clinic is a community-based and trauma-informed resource in which volunteer technologists assist survivors with identifying points of compromise on their device(s) and developing mitigation plans. We situate the development of the TECC Clinic alongside a needs assessment that was conducted as part of an ongoing community-based participatory action research project. The needs assessment identified an inconsistency among victim advocates regarding technology-specific safety planning knowledge and gaps in resources for survivors experiencing technology-enabled coercive control (TECC). Preliminary analysis following a 6-month pilot of the TECC Clinic illustrates the effectiveness of the TECC Clinic for increasing survivors' technology-specific safety planning knowledge and its potential as a valuable support service for survivors experiencing TECC.

The entanglements of the law, digital technologies and domestic violence in Seattle

This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors’ experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women’s experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts’ transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies.

Conceptualizing impact in community-based participatory action research to engage communities in end-of-life issues.

Background:A health promotion approach to end-of-life (EoL) care is gaining traction internationally. However, there is a lack of evaluations of the impact of this approach, particularly regarding community-based initiatives. Conceptualizations of impact in participatory action research (PAR) may contribute to understanding ways in which impact can be investigated in community-based health promotion approaches to EoL issues. We aim to investigate impact and the process of impact development in our community-based PAR project, Studio DöBra, a Swedish health promotion initiative to engage communities in EoL issues.Methods:We do this through a qualitative framework analysis expanding on Banks et al.’s theory of co-impact in PAR, based on longitudinal empirical data of Studio DöBra. Studio DöBra was developed in partnership with a range of community organizations and engaged children (9 years old) and older adults (most 80+) with topics related to dying, death, and loss through arts activities. The analyzed empirical data reflect the perspectives of community-partners and academic partners from interviews and meetings spanning 4.5 years.Findings:We present a model of impact development consisting of impact on individual and group development, action-oriented impact, and strategy-oriented impact; ways they relate to and evolve from one another; and how they may be affected by contextual influences.Conclusion:Besides contributing to conceptualizations of impact in PAR, findings contribute a community perspective to the limited literature investigating the impact of health promotion initiatives related to EoL issues.

Critically examining a community-based participatory action research project with forced migrant youth

This paper pertains to a project which began with an academic research team being recruited by a YMCA management team to help understand how to retain forced migrant youth in YMCA sport programs. Owing to experience working with diverse cultural groups through praxis-oriented approaches, the project team recognized a need to develop an understanding of how forced migrant youth wished to engage in sport where the onus was not exclusively theirs to shoulder the navigation of cultural differences. We present a critical analysis, interspersed with creative non-fiction accounts, to show how forced migrant youth, their families, YMCA settlement staff members, and an academic research team collaborated to increase awareness of the diverse cultural ‘realities’ present in our community and social inequalities faced by forced migrant youth. We conclude with lessons related to community capacity building and the development of contextually relevant sport programs.

Amxsame’ su sa ‘Nawalakw (the supernatural spirit wraps around us): impacts of Kwakwaka’wakw regalia making on identity, wellness and belonging in ‘Yalis, British Columbia

In this article, we share findings from a community-based Participatory Action Research project, titled Sanala, which means to be whole in Kwak’wala—the language of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak̓wala-speaking people; a First Nation from what is now called Canada). In response to community priorities, the Sanala team initiated regalia as a weekly programme where people from the ‘Namgis tribe and other surrounding Kwakwaka’wakw Nations on the northwest coast of British Columbia, Canada, come together to create regalia. Participants learn about family crests, design and sew button blankets and dance aprons, and learn oral histories belonging to individuals and families, all within the context of Kwak’wala language revitalization and regalia making. We outline the impacts of this programme on identity, belonging, wholistic health and collective wellbeing, as well as implications for Participatory Action Research and community-led research aimed at strengthening individual and collective health and wellness through Indigenous languages and cultural continuity.

Reflections on change theory and community-based participatory action research: Congruent, similar or different?

While change is acknowledged as integral to all action research, literature linking the theories of change theoretically merits exploration. Are some theories of change more congruent to principles of action research than others? Does congruence depend on which type of action research and which change theory are being compared? During the implementation of a four-cycle community-based participatory action research (CBPR) project in nursing education in Ghana, such questions arose. This paper is an attempt to grapple with those questions. While Kotter’s eight-step theory of organizational change was chosen to guide this study, it became obvious that various elements of change theories were integrated in the study as it progressed. For Kotter’s organizational change theory to serve as an effective guide for the implementation cycles in the CBPR project, it must be conducted through the lens of critical social theory and a perspective on social and cultural change.

Centering Black Girls in Sexual Harassment Research: A Community-Based Participatory Action Research Approach

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice statistics, 1 in 4 Black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18. The founder of the #Metoo movement, Ms. Tarana Burke, originally designed the hashtag to help bring awareness to Black women and girls from underprivileged communities that experienced rape or sexual assault. However, the phrase was co-opted by White women sharing their experience of being sexually violated or harassed on social media which resulted in Black girls’ experiences being left in the shadows, silencing their experiences. Here we describe the advocacy work of a community coalition dedicated to eradicating inequities Black girls’ experience in systems, including schools, the criminal justice system, and social services. We document our work regarding Black girls' experiences of sexual harassment in schools. We developed a community-based participatory action research project to center Black girls' perspectives about sexual harassment. We administered anonymous surveys to 45 Black girls in grades 7–12. Our findings demonstrate that girls experience a range of sexual harassment behaviors in person and online and report numerous adverse emotional, physical, and educational impacts.

Affirmation and Safety: An Intersectional Analysis of Trans and Nonbinary Youths in Quebec

Abstract This article presents the results of a combined grounded theory and community-based participatory action research project with 54 trans and nonbinary youths (TNBY) residing in the province of Quebec, Canada. The project includes two important sensitizing concepts: intersectionality and recognition. In the research, intersectionality was defined as an approach that explores how people navigate manifold identities (class, race, disability, and so on) in the context of structural oppression. Authors applied an intersectional lens to the recruitment of research participants through an iterative, community-based process, and to the analysis of the oppressive structures that negatively influence the well-being of TNBY and the specific factors that enable TNBY to thrive. Drawing on Honneth’s concept of recognition, authors argue for a contextualized, dynamic, and relational understanding of how well-being is produced. Specifically, they show two presenting needs: one for affirmation and one for safety, access to which springs from resources of privilege that emerge in the environment in which young people are embedded and from which they self-advocate. Understanding the dynamic relationship between these two needs and how they shift according to context is an important component of applying an intersectional approach to supporting TNBY in social work settings.

Play Elements as Mechanisms in Intergenerational Arts Activities to Support Community Engagement with End-of-Life Issues.

Talking about dying, death, and loss may be difficult. Arts offer alternative ways of engaging with end-of-life (EoL) issues, but little is known about the means through which this occurs. In this article, we aim to explore mechanisms in arts activities that support community engagement with EoL issues, based on the community-based participatory action research project Studio DöBra. Studio DöBra was developed to support community engagement with EoL issues through intergenerational arts workshops involving community partners, children, and older adults. Initial analysis with community partners indicated the importance of play elements in arts activities. Continued analysis was therefore abductive, using play theory and qualitative data from Studio DöBra arts activities. Through iterative examination of theory and data, we modified play theory as we identified mechanisms supporting community engagement with EoL issues in arts activities. Findings can contribute to theory-building that can inform arts activities supporting community engagement with EoL issues.

Hands across Care: Art and social practice in health and elder care contexts

ObjectivesThe convergence of socially engaged art and innovative health care was a key focus of Space and Place in End-of-Life Care, a Swedish transdisciplinary research project (2017–2020). For this project, researchers created, facilitated, and documented a range of socially engaged art and innovative healthcare practices during their exploration of the end of life in the context of Stockholm elder care residential settings. Study designFormulated as a year-long transdisciplinary research residency, two or more art, design, and/or innovative healthcare researchers met in a Stockholm residential elder care home on a weekly basis to observe and encounter people and place and interact, converse, produce, and exchange knowledge in collaboration with the residents, carers, management, friends, family members, and other researchers. MethodsResearchers engaged in a weekly transdisciplinary research residency in a Stockholm elder care residence to encounter and interact with the people, space and place of the study setting, and learn from and contribute to the residential home. The scientific researchers engaged in a community-based participatory action research project that utilized interviews, photo-elicitation processes, and community round table discussions. This happened in dialogue with the artistic residency process, wherein the artists collaborated with the inhabitants, staff, and visitors of the residential elder care home to produce a series of socially engaged events, experiences, and artifacts, one of which was the participatory art event, the Handfestival that is the case study of this article. ResultsThe weekly artistic residency for the Space and Place in End-of-Life Care project resulted in the Handfestival, a participatory art event exploring hands, touch and conversation generated by researchers from the fields of art, design, innovative health and elder care in collaboration with residents, staff and family of a Swedish elder care residence. The Handfestival is a model on the intersection between socially engaged art practices and innovative health care approaches and demonstrates how elder care residences and public health agencies could engage in regular, creative, and relational activities for the participation of inhabitants in healthcare settings. ConclusionsSocially engaged and participatory art practices increase levels of social engagement and promote a greater sense of interconnectivity within health care settings. As such, the Handfestival participatory event reveals the potential for the convergence of art and health via social practice, modeling a way to develop, orchestrate and disseminate events, experiences, and/or artifacts as health services that public health agencies can and should deliver, but might find challenging to imagine and manifest.

The changing meaning of sport during forced immigrant youths' acculturative journeys

ObjectivesTo facilitate intercultural understanding by centralizing forced immigrant youths' voices in the knowledge development phase of a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) project. The aim of this paper is to reveal the role of sport in forced immigrant youths' acculturative journeys in different communities. MethodologyWe utilized ‘get-to-know-you’ arts-based conversational interviews (m time = 38 min) held at the onset of a community-based participatory action research project. A polyphonic (i.e., multi-voiced) vignette is used to portray an interpretive account of the stories told by 22 refugee and asylum seeking (i.e., forced immigrant) youth (m age – 13.4 years) developed through a reflexive thematic analysis. ResultsThe three-scene polyphonic vignette stories the role sport has played, and continues to play, in forced immigrant youths' life journeys. The opening scene brings to light stories related to home country sport involvement. The second scene depicts how sport was engaged in during their journey to their current host community. The third scene completes the story focusing on how youth engage in sport during resettlement in their host Canadian community. ConclusionsThe meaning of sport, and what it means to be safe in sport, changes over the course of forced immigrant youths' acculturative journeys. Feeling safe in sport offers a unique opportunity for youth to feel a sense of sharing their acculturative journey with those around them.

Cocomposing an Aesthetic Self Through Play: Toward a Transformative Framework for Dementia Care.

Aging and deterioration mark a new phase in many older adults' life, highlighting the importance of creativity and imagination. This article introduces the implementation of an innovative program, Play Intervention for Dementia, at a nursing home in Hong Kong, with emphasis on its contribution to the conceptual framework for understanding the selfhood of older adults with dementia. As a community-based participatory action research project, this study democratized knowledge production by integrating voices of practitioners with diverse backgrounds through video-based methods. Play, as an activity replete with free expressions and impulsive interactions, is an ideal realm for exploring and establishing selfhood with older adults with dementia. It has been found that "aesthetic self," an alternative self emerging from immediate aesthetic experience and carrying transformative power within the caring relationship, is a necessary element of self-construction in life with dementia. Integrating theories and practice, this framework provides a new lens for understanding and responding to selfhood, disease, and life.

Engaging Interdisciplinary Service Providers to Enhance Collaboration to Support Refugee Families whose Children have Special Health Care Needs

ABSTRACT This article reports on the early stages of a community-based participatory action research project aimed at understanding how medical, educational and social service providers in our community partner with refugee families whose children have special health care needs, what challenges they face, and how we might collaboratively address identified needs through forming a community of practice and collaboratively conducting action research. In this manuscript, we detail the methods used to gather interdisciplinary professionals from our community in focus groups centered on how participants collaborated and supported refugee families of children with special health care needs and how we could join together to engage in action research to benefit their work. Findings reveal strengths, barriers, and needs related to interdisciplinary collaboration and ideas for community-engaged action research projects on which the community of practice could focus moving forward. An implication of this study is the importance of participatory processes for initiating action research projects within the community. We also offer guidance around potential areas for improved practice across school, medical and community settings when serving refugee families whose children have special health care needs.

Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future: Aboriginal parents' views of what helps support recovery from complex trauma.

We aimed to understand support needs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma.Becoming a parent is an exciting yet challenging transition, particularly for parents who have experienced past hurt in their own childhood which can have long lasting effects, including complex trauma. Complex trauma-related distress can make it harder to care for a baby, but the parenting transition offers unique opportunities for recovery.This formative research is part of a community-based participatory action research project which aims to co-design perinatal awareness, recognition, assessment and support strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma. We used an Indigenist approach and grounded theory methods. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents who were pregnant and/or have children up to two years old were recruited through perinatal care services and community networks in three Australian sites (Alice Springs, Adelaide and Melbourne). Parents were offered a group discussion or individual interview, facilitated by Aboriginal researchers. Third-person scenarios and visual tools were used to facilitate reflections about the impact of past experiences, what keeps parents strong, hopes and dreams, and what is needed to achieve those dreams. Parents were also shown themes from a previous systematic review of parents' experiences as a prompt to identify any additional key issues.Seventeen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents participated in August to September 2019. Most were mothers (n = 15). The study's grounded theory methods provided the foundation of a theoretical supposition that positions the transformation of the compounding cycle of trauma, to a reinforcing cycle of nurturing at the intersection of: 1) parents' connectedness; 2) social and emotional wellbeing; and 3) the transition to parenting. Unique opportunities and challenges situated at the interface are bound to the compounding or reinforcing nature of the intersecting factors. Findings reveal complexity, differing experiences by gender and age, as well as within and between communities.