Participatory Research Practices Research Articles

Early Childhood Studies – students’ participation in the development of a learning space in a higher education institution

The article argues for the participation and involvement of students in developing learning spaces within higher education. In early childhood education there is a strong emphasis upon rights, democracy and planning learning through listening to young children. Taking inspiration from this, the study explores the use of participatory approaches in developing an Early Childhood Resource and Research room within a higher education institution. The article draws from the principles and practices of participatory research, where participants are considered as researchers, and from the distributed leadership approach that encourages shared decision-making. Applications of these principles are analysed by adopting various participatory methods with an aim to create a democratic, social and politically ‘safe space’ for the students to work in. The example of methods used in this article can serve as a basis for adopting alternative approaches to traditional leadership and management, highlighting the use of more democratic practices in creating learning environments.

The diversity of participatory design research practice at PDC 2002–2012

We investigate the diversity of participatory design research practice, based on a review of ten years of participatory design research published as full research papers at the Participatory Design Conferences (PDC) 2002–2012, and relate this body of research to five fundamental aspects of PD from classic participatory design literature. We identify five main categories of research contributions: Participatory Design in new domains, Participatory Design methods, Participatory Design and new technology, Theoretical contributions to Participatory Design, and Basic concepts in Participatory Design. Moreover, we identify how participation is defined, and how participation is conducted in experimental design cases, with a particular focus on interpretation, planning, and decision-making in the design process.

Challenging Research: Completing Participatory Social Research with Children and Adolescents in a Hospital Setting

A discussion of the challenges to completing participatory social research with children and adolescents in a hospital setting. Beginning with the dominant medical culture of hospitals, coupled with a persistent skepticism of social and in particular, qualitative research and its contribution to knowledge in medical circles, restrictive contextual challenges also include attitudinal, methodological, and logistical considerations. Together, these challenges hamper good participatory research practice and the capacity to maintain quality data, as well as impede children's participation in research, which has the capacity to contribute to healthcare design, policy, and planning processes. Two studies in pediatric settings in Australia, one of which was completed in 2008 and the other which was discontinued in 2011, provide the basis for this research discussion. The discussion addresses the issues that persist in inhibiting the completion of participatory social research and the resulting impacts on research, children's right to participate, and the volume of evidence that is ultimately available from children's perspectives to support and inform healthcare design, planning, and policy in pediatric settings. Recommendations for changes that could strengthen and improve this research experience include building awareness of the potential value of this research; increasing its influence; building the capacity and knowledge of gatekeepers, ethics committees, and researchers working in this context; and recognizing and valuing children's competence and participation. Evidence-based design, hospital, methodology, patients, pediatric.

Indigenous Youth Participatory Action Research: Re-visioning Social Justice for Social Work with Indigenous Youths

The NASW Code of Ethics identifies social justice as one of six foundational values of the social work profession. Indigenous communities have long questioned the authenticity of this commitment and rightly so, given the historical activities of social work and social workers. Still, the commitment persists as an inspiration for an imperfect, yet determined, profession. This article presents a theoretical discussion of questions pertinent for social justice in social work practice in Native American communities: Whose definition of social justice should prevail in work with and in Indigenous communities? What can a revisioning of social justice mean to the development of Native communities and for Native youths in particular? What methods or processes of social work are most appropriate for this social justice work? This article presents a case for the practice of youth participatory action research as one method to work for social justice in Native communities.

Experience Corps: A dual trial to promote the health of older adults and children's academic success

BackgroundAs the population ages, older adults are seeking meaningful, and impactful, post-retirement roles. As a society, improving the health of people throughout longer lives is a major public health goal. This paper presents the design and rationale for an effectiveness trial of Experience Corps™, an intervention created to address both these needs. This trial evaluates (1) whether senior volunteer roles within Experience Corps™ beneficially impact children's academic achievement and classroom behavior in public elementary schools and (2) impact on the health of volunteers. MethodsDual evaluations of (1) an intention-to-treat trial randomizing eligible adults 60 and older to volunteer service in Experience Corps™, or to a control arm of usual volunteering opportunities, and (2) a comparison of eligible public elementary schools receiving Experience Corps™ to matched, eligible control schools in a 1:1 control:intervention school ratio. OutcomesFor older adults, the primary outcome is decreased disability in mobility and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). Secondary outcomes are decreased frailty, falls, and memory loss; slowed loss of strength, balance, walking speed, cortical plasticity, and executive function; objective performance of IADLs; and increased social and psychological engagement. For children, primary outcomes are improved reading achievement and classroom behavior in Kindergarten through the 3rd grade; secondary outcomes are improvements in school climate, teacher morale and retention, and teacher perceptions of older adults. SummaryThis trial incorporates principles and practices of community-based participatory research and evaluates the dual benefit of a single intervention, versus usual opportunities, for two generations: older adults and children.

Research Immersion at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine — An Integrated Curriculum Producing Scientist Physicians for the Future of Healthcare

The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine (VTCSOM) is a four-year allopathic medical school in Roanoke, Virginia, that matriculated its first class of 42 students in August, 2010. The creation of a new medical school through the partnership of an established public research intensive university, Virginia Tech, and an established private health system, Carilion Clinic provided a rare opportunity to craft a high-impact research curriculum, unique in both design and delivery. As part of the new curriculum, the faculty created a comprehensive four-year, longitudinal, research program that integrates the principles and practice of active participatory research into both basic and clinical science education and ultimately into the lifelong application of evidence-based medicine to patient care.

“Bounded” Empowerment: Analyzing Tensions in the Practice of Youth‐Led Participatory Research in Urban Public Schools

This multi-method study examines tensions in the practice of youth-led participatory research (YPAR) in urban high schools among 15 semester-cohorts. Student participants in the present study were 77 ethnically diverse youth from four high schools in a major metropolitan school district. Data were gathered using systematic classroom observations, interviews with teachers and students involved in the projects, and participant observation. The two most commonly-constrained phases of the YPAR project were issue selection and action steps. A central tension in the issue selection phase for projects enacted across multiple semester cohorts was the tension between original inquiry and "traction:" Sticking with the same topic enabled sustained building of strategic alliances and expertise for making change, but limited the incoming cohort's power to define the problem to be addressed. In further analyses, we identified processes that promoted student power despite continuity-related constraints-teachers' framing and buy-in strategies, "micro-power" compensation, and alignment of students' interests with the prior cohort-as well as constraints in other phases of the projects. This study's findings regarding the promotion of youth power in the face of constraints advance the integration of theory and practice in youth-led research and have implications for participatory research more broadly.

Privileging Younger Children's Voices in Research: Use of Drawings and a Co-Construction Process

The growing acknowledgement of the value of listening to children's views and experiences in social research, popularly termed as “listening to their voices,” brings with it methodological consequences. Regarding children as expert informants about their own lives carries with it the simultaneous call for researchers to be experts in developing and employing appropriate strategies that can effectively elicit the insights that children can bring to a research topic. With younger children, the use of participatory methodologies has been foregrounded as the key to unlocking their potential to contribute rich and useful perspectives to inform research into their lives. This article explores the usefulness of employing preschoolers' drawings within the context of a co-construction process to facilitate the children's construction of ideas and reinforce their voices in research. The case is made that the quality of the dialogical engagement is as important as the drawing itself, and both visual images and the verbal exchanges are central to the children's meaning-making process. In the co-construction process, both adult and child are (ideally) equal players and the resulting dialogical process plays a major role in the constitution of the phenomena. The role of the researcher as the co-constructor can be a challenging one because it entails engaging and supporting children's views and the expression of these views. The discussion and illustrations from the first author's research projects contribute to the literature base on positioning preschool children as valid social actors in their communities.We operate through an ethos of empowerment of all participants, and aim for participatory research practice which has at its heart an active involvement in promoting the rights of children as citizens with voice and power. (Pascal & Bertram, 2009, p. 249)

Maximizing Chronic Disease Prevention and Management through Community Based Participatory Research and Inter-collaborative Practices

Worldwide societies are aging, giving rise to focus more on chronic disease prevention and management efforts. Such initiatives may be maximized by incorporating a community based participatory research (CBPR) as well as an inter-collaborative practice (ICP) approach. Each strives to garner viable and constructive ideas from lay and professional individuals so as to effectively address current societal issues and challenges. Hence the aim of this review is to consider use of CBPR and ICP strategies as ways to help ascertain the real and diverse health and social care needs of individuals, groups and even whole societies. Setting: non-institutional and community based. Method and Design: utilizing a critical social science perspective, a cross-section of the literature was reviewed over a period of three months in 2012. Varied databases were accessed including PsycLit, Sociofile, PubMed, and Ageline. Conclusions: although scantly addressed, it appears that the utilization of CBPR and ICP strategies may help professionals, community organizations and lay citizens to better allocate scarce community resources. Collectively and individually, these versatile strategies may help maximize a given community's chronic disease management and prevention potential. Towards this on-going end, this paper seeks to contribute.

From Leaky Pipeline to Irrigation System: Minority Education Through the Lens of Community-Based Participatory Research

Higher education has long made efforts to increase underrepresented minority participation in biomedical research and health fields. However, relatively few minority trainees complete advanced degrees or proceed to independent research careers, a loss referred to as the "leaky pipeline." Minority trainees may take alternate pathways to climbing the academic ladder, exiting to pursue multiple disciplinary or community-serving roles. The authors propose a model for understanding minority departures from the education pipeline as a basis for supporting careers that align with community goals for health. Concepts of the traditional pipeline training model are compared with a model that aligns with community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles and practices. The article describes an irrigation model that incorporates informal learning from academic and community knowledge bases to prepare trainees for CBPR and interdisciplinary research. Students serve as agents that foster individual, institutional, and social change needed to address health problems while attending to root causes of disparities. Viewing minority students as agents for community engagement allows institutions to reassess the role training can play in diversifying participation in higher education and research. An irrigation model supports development of an infrastructure that optimizes success at all post-secondary levels, and enhances CBPR capacity wherever trainees live, work, and learn. Linking formal education to informal learning in context of CBPR experiences can also reduce community mistrust of research while nurturing productive research partnerships with communities to address health disparities.

A realist-constructionist perspective on participatory research in health promotion

Clarifying the contours of research in health promotion (HP) is an ongoing challenge. Research in this action-oriented field has traditionally been developed based on values such as participation and empowerment. Consequently, many forms of participatory research have emerged throughout the years, and participatory research has positioned itself as a core competency of HP and public health. This paper argues that participation as a normative stance guiding methodology, or as value, is a fragile posture upon which to position research practices. The argument is based on a realist-constructionist perspective of science and specifically uses Law and Latour's notion of inscription device and Callon's actor-network theory to suggest that participation is an epistemological necessity and that participatory research practices may be considered as inscription devices. These theoretical notions help clarify the consequences of participation on knowledge production. Finally, the article refers to Stengers's work to propose an ecology of research practices that defines obligations and exigencies for HP with respect to knowledge production and that are more consistent with the field's values of social justice and equity.

The Impact of Participatory Research on Urban Teens: An Experimental Evaluation

Although there is much practice of community-based participatory research in economically-developing countries and increasingly in North America, there has been little systematic assessment of empowerment effects. Youth-led participatory research holds particular promise for fostering positive development and civic participation among economically disadvantaged urban youth. The present investigation uses a clustered-randomized, within-school experimental design to test the effects of youth-led participatory research on the psychological empowerment of 401 students attending urban public schools. We find that attending a participatory research elective class during the school day was associated with increases in sociopolitical skills, motivation to influence their schools and communities, and participatory behavior. We found no significant effects for perceived control at school. The implications for participatory research and related youth development interventions are discussed.

In the Midst of Participatory Action Research Practices: Moving towards Decolonizing and Decolonial Praxis

Where disenfranchised groups such as women, immigrants and people of color more generally were either excluded from the academy or not thought to have important 'stories' to tell, several qualitative methodologies now value these voices, in large measure because disenfranchised research participants have an understanding in their bodies of what it means to be exposed to patriarchy, racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, xenophobia and other complex forms of oppression (Gitlin, 2007, p.1).

Roadmap for a Participatory Research–Practice Partnership to Implement Evidence

Background: Our research team has undertaken implementation of evidence in the form of practice guideline recommendations for populations in hospital, community, and long-term care settings with diverse provider and patient populations (people with chronic wounds, e.g., pressure and leg ulcers, heart failure, stroke, diabetes, palliative care, cancer, and maternity care). Translating evidence into clinical practice at the point of care is a complex and often overwhelming challenge for the health system as well as for individual practitioners.Purpose: To ensure that best available evidence is integrated into practice, “local evidence” needs to be generated and this process accomplishes a number of things: it focuses all involved on the “same page,” identifies important facilitating factors as well as barriers, provides empirical support for planning, and in itself is a key aspect of implementation. In doing this work, we developed a roadmap, the Queen’s University Research Roadmap for Knowledge Implementation (QuRKI) that outlines three major phases of linked research and implementation activity: (1) issue identification/clarification; (2) solution building; and (3) implementation, evaluation, and nurturing the change.In this paper, we describe our practical experience as researchers working at point-of-care and how research can be used to facilitate the implementation of evidence. An exemplar is used to illustrate the fluid interplay of research and implementation activities and present the range of supporting research.Implications: QuRKI serves as a guide for researchers in the formation of a strategic alliance with the practice community for undertaking evidence-informed reorganization of care. Using this collaborative approach, researchers play an integral role in focusing on, and using evidence during all discussions. We welcome further evaluation of its usefulness in the field.

Avoiding the involvement overdose: Drugs, race, ethnicity and participatory research practice

Participatory research (PR) strategies have been used extensively in policy and practice based research in the last fifteen years in the UK. This paper offers a critical reflection on the growth in PR programmes commissioned by statutory bodies as part of attempts to understand the influence of race, ethnicity and racism on issues related to substance misuse policy and practice. The stated aim of many PR programmes has been to alter the role of the communities involved, from the subject matter of research activity undertaken by academic outsiders, to co- roducers of knowledge. The paper addresses four specific issues: first, the recent political context in which the use of PR has grown; second, the ways in which participation and community have been operationalized in different projects; third, the differences between vertically driven and horizontally driven PR; and fourth, the different methods and modes of involvement and their implications. It finishes by raising some concerns which might inform future approaches to PR.

Feminist Systems Theory: Learning by Praxis

Feminist Systems Theory (FST) is an emerging theory grounded in cultural ecofeminism and critical systems theory. FST's contribution is in a set of principles that contain implications for community development and social research. FST brings to the fore the importance of valuing and considering the voices of people at the margins of social research and community development projects and is an effort towards a new ontology and language of person and nature to adequately address environmental marginalization. The 'systems' theory contribution to FST enriches our repertoires of methods and tools with an emphasis on systems thinking characterised by the use of boundary analysis. FST is ideally situated to enhance systemic intervention practice, an application of action research and participatory research practices. This paper will examine 'process philosophy' necessary to understand the nature of boundary analysis and the implications for FST and praxis with relevant examples drawn from case studies of current applications of FST in action research settings; (1) economic analysis and transition pathways; (2) policy analysis of the Close the Gap strategy for Indigenous equality and equity in Australia; (3) a community food distribution system; and, (4) a community health and diabetes prevention program.

Verbalization in Children’s Drawing Performances: Toward a Metaphorical Continuum of Inscription, Extension, and Re-Inscription

Reconceptualizing the relationship between a child/subject and the adult/researcher is necessary in order to begin unraveling the possibilities entangled in children’s learning practices, particularly those articulated by/through children’s drawing performances. This article seeks to expand upon the complexities of researcher/subject relationships, participatory research practices, documentation as a context for critical inquiry and interpretation, and children’s drawing as a social performance. Utilizing a metaphorical continuum of inscription, extension, and re-inscription to continually re-contextualize the verbal interactions between Carter (the subject) and myself (the researcher), spaces of de-familiarization are constructed that illuminate and give rise to additional epistemological layers, accentuating an already complex understanding of children’s drawing performances.

From Controlled Trial to Community Adoption: The Multisite Translational Community Trial

Methods for translating the findings of controlled trials, such as the Diabetes Prevention Program, into real-world community application have not been clearly defined. A standardized research methodology for making and evaluating such a transition is needed. We introduce the multisite translational community trial (mTCT) as the research analog to the multisite randomized controlled trial. The mTCT is adapted to incorporate the principles and practices of community-based participatory research and the increased relevance and generalizability gained from diverse community settings. The mTCT is a tool designed to bridge the gap between what a clinical trial demonstrates can work in principle and what is needed to make it workable and effective in real-world settings. Its utility could be put to the test, in particular with practice-based research networks such as the Prevention Research Centers.

Assessing the outcomes of participatory research: protocol for identifying, selecting, appraising and synthesizing the literature for realist review

BackgroundParticipatory Research (PR) entails the co-governance of research by academic researchers and end-users. End-users are those who are affected by issues under study (e.g., community groups or populations affected by illness), or those positioned to act on the knowledge generated by research (e.g., clinicians, community leaders, health managers, patients, and policy makers). Systematic reviews assessing the generalizable benefits of PR must address: the diversity of research topics, methods, and intervention designs that involve a PR approach; varying degrees of end-user involvement in research co-governance, both within and between projects; and the complexity of outcomes arising from long-term partnerships.MethodsWe addressed the above mentioned challenges by adapting realist review methodology to PR assessment, specifically by developing inductively-driven identification, selection, appraisal, and synthesis procedures. This approach allowed us to address the non-uniformity and complexity of the PR literature. Each stage of the review involved two independent reviewers and followed a reproducible, systematic coding and retention procedure. Retained studies were completed participatory health interventions, demonstrated high levels of participation by non-academic stakeholders (i.e., excluding studies in which end-users were not involved in co-governing throughout the stages of research) and contained detailed descriptions of the participatory process and context. Retained sets are being mapped and analyzed using realist review methods.ResultsThe librarian-guided search string yielded 7,167 citations. A total of 594 citations were retained after the identification process. Eighty-three papers remained after selection. Principle Investigators (PIs) were contacted to solicit all companion papers. Twenty-three sets of papers (23 PR studies), comprising 276 publications, passed appraisal and are being synthesized using realist review methods.DiscussionThe systematic and stage-based procedure addressed challenges to PR assessment and generated our robust understanding of complex and heterogeneous PR practices. To date, realist reviews have focussed on evaluations of relatively uniform interventions. In contrast our PR search yielded a wide diversity of partnerships and research topics. We therefore developed tools to achieve conceptual clarity on the PR field, as a beneficial precursor to our theoretically-driven synthesis using realist methods. Findings from the ongoing review will be provided in forthcoming publications.

Reflections on a Politics of Research for the Right to the City

The idea of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 2003), based on the understanding of the ‘urban’ as a unique form of human existence, has become a popular framework both for thinking about social justice in a specifically urban context and as a profound and at the same time flexible framework for urban grassroots organizing. Through theoretical exploration and practical examples, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the formation of a politics of research and knowledge production that suits the concept and practice of the right to the city. Based on an expansion of the “right to research” as developed by Arjun Appadurai (2006) and heavily influenced by the theory and practice of Participatory Action Research, the overall argument of this paper is that the right to research has to be acknowledged as an inevitable component of any struggle for the right to the city.