participatory action research

Participatory Action Research at MIT

What is par, participatory action research (par).

By Lawrence Susskind*

This is not to say that applied social science research isn't important. On the contrary, the most serious problems we face today are social and political, not physical. We need to make sure that social science is used to produce prescriptive insights and advice for those trying to promote social change.

Where have social scientists gone wrong?

• First, you have to believe that the two halves of the community are initially the same (and stay the same) during the course of the experiment.
• Second, you must believe that everything else remains constant during the course of the experiment.
• Third, you have to believe that the experimental effort and not something else caused whatever statistically results emerged..

Putting aside ethical and moral concerns about withholding a benefit or imposing something bad on half a community so that someone’s theories can be tested, serious methodological problems remain. Mere correlation isn't a sufficient basis for reshaping public policy or interfering in people's lives. Even more important is the fact that statistical relevance doesn't explain why good or bad things happen. Social scientists should stop pretending that correlation equals causation. They should admit that the complexity and uncertainty involved in the social systems in which we live and work make science-like generalizations about people, communities and institutions extremely unreliable.

Getting social science back on track

PAR produces “actionable” knowledge by focusing on individual situations rather than on statistical analysis of large samples or controlled experiments. All PAR knowledge is "situated."  That means it is place- or case-specific. PAR puts a premium on local knowledge (what people in real situation know from their first-hand experience), rather than what experts think. And, PAR measures the success of applied social research in terms of the what client-communities understand , rather than what peer-reviewers think or the replicability of  findings. The goal of PAR-like applied social research isn't to generate proof.. On the contrary, the objective of PAR is to generate what Aristotle would have called "practical wisdom" or useable knowledge, believable to those who have to take action if social change is going to occur. Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin, in  Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change (2006), do a nice job of summarizing the development and current state of PAR.

Many dilemmas still surround participatory action research. These are the focus of ongoing debate among a growing community of PAR scholars and practitioners. Who represents a community, an agency or a client? How should power imbalances in a client-community be handled? How can a "friendly outsider" (i.e. a PAR researcher) convince a client-community that he or she should be trusted? Who should make the final decision about which data ought to be gathered and how findings should be interpreted? How should case specific findings be integrated with what has been learned from other cases or from insights generated by traditional applied social scientists? What role should PAR researchers play in formulating prescriptions for action? Can and should the PAR researcher stay involved with a client-community as its seeks to monitor results and make ongoing adjustments?

Building a community of PAR scholars

The resistance to PAR is strongest among social scientists who yearn to be part of the natural science fraternity, and who are more concerned about being respected by other academics than they are about building the capacity of client-communities to solve the problems they face. In their view, PAR advocates feed right into the hands of natural science skeptics who think putting "social" in front of scientist is equivalent to putting "witch" in front of "doctor." PAR practitioners, for their part, are worried that traditional social scientists are oblivious to the harm they do when they generalize about social and political phenomenon and fail to appreciate the case specific implications of their findings.

We want to initiate a different conversation. PAR teachers and practitioners should focus on explaining to their potential client-communities what they do, and why they do it (and why it would be best to work with PAR researchers rather than traditional social scientists). They should do more to codify the ethical norms that guide PAR in practice so they can be held accountable. And, they should think hard about the best ways of integrating what PAR teaches about case specific situations with the kinds of generalizations that traditional social scientists produce. Finally, we believe that graduate students interested in PAR should also seek to master a range of traditional science research methods. Mixed methods can yield valuable insights.

*Lawrence Susskind is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.  He has been a member of the MIT faculty for more than 40 years. He is also Vice-Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Founder/Chief Knowledge Officer of the Consensus Building Institute.

[1] A number of authors have done a masterful job spelling out all the reasons why social scientists should stop aspiring to be natural scientists. See Bent Flyvbjerg’s books  Real Social Science  (2012) and  Making Social Science Matter  (2001) for a full explanation. 

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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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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.

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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.

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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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Participatory action research.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an approach to enquiry which has been used since the 1940s. It involves researchers and participants working together to understand a problematic situation and change it for the better. There are many definitions of the approach, which share some common elements. PAR focuses on social change that promotes democracy and challenges inequality; is context-specific , often targeted on the needs of a particular group; is an iterative cycle of research, action and reflection; and often seeks to ‘liberate’ participants to have a greater awareness of their situation in order to take action. PAR uses a range of different methods, both qualitative and quantitative.

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A Guide to Selecting Participatory Research Methods Based on Project and Partnership Goals

Stephanie r duea, emily b zimmerman, lisa m vaughn, janet harris.

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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stephanie Duea, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 610 South College Road, Wilmington, North Carolina 28403-5995, United States. [email protected]

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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY-4.0). View this license’s legal deed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 and legal code at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode for more information.

Participatory research engages community stakeholders in the research process, from problem identification and developing the research question, to dissemination of results. There is increasing recognition in the field of health research that community-engaged methods can be used throughout the research process. The volume of guidance for engaging communities and conducting participatory research has grown steadily in the past 40+ years, in many countries and contexts. Further, some institutions now require stakeholder engagement in research as a condition of funding. Interest in collaborating in the research process is also growing among patients and the public. This article provides an overview for selecting participatory research methods based on project and partnerships goals.

Keywords: stakeholder engagement, community-engaged research, participatory health research, research methods

Participatory research engages community stakeholders to work alongside academics across all stages of the research process, from problem identification and developing the research question to the dissemination of results. Community and stakeholder engagement can be defined as the involvement of relevant stakeholders as full partners in all phases of research, requiring relationships built on trust and respect regardless of partners’ training or experience in science or research ( Woolf et al., 2016 ). In this context, and throughout the research process, participation is the defining principle “recognizing the value of each person’s contribution to the co-creation of knowledge in a process that is not only practical, but also collaborative and empowering” ( ICPHR, 2013 , p. 5). Cornwall and Jewkes (1995) compare participatory and conventional research processes and note that “the key difference between participatory and other research methodologies lies in the location of power in the various stages of the research process.” Authentic engagement in the research process develops community capacity to be co-producers of the research process and outcomes.

Participatory Health Research (PHR) is a research paradigm whereby the research process, in its entirety, is a partnership between stakeholders with different backgrounds and perspectives, such as researchers, professionals, community members, policy makers, and others ( ICPHR, 2013 ). The collaborative nature of participatory research necessitates a trustful relationship between the researchers and community partners, which in turn can promote the community’s acceptance of the study. Community acceptance may improve participation, data quality, and uptake of results ( Abma et al., 2019 ; Balazs & Morello-Frosch, 2013 ; Ramsden et al., 2010 ).

The use of a participatory research approach enables the integration of stakeholder perspectives and research on questions prioritized by communities that are often not considered by researchers. Hence, the engagement of communities in the study design contributes to production of data that are more adequate and relevant for them ( Balazs & Morello-Frosch, 2013 ; Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020 ). This engagement is also valuable in the development and validation of data collection instruments, development of tailored recruitment approaches, and data collection ( Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020 ). By having a deep knowledge of the community context, community partners can help researchers identify locations and social networks to facilitate participant recruitment and data collection. This is particularly true with underrepresented populations as these groups might be more reluctant to participate in research studies ( Dias et al., 2018 ; Rodriguez Espinosa & Verney, 2020 ). Additionally, the participatory research process contributes to the promotion of capacity building, empowerment of communities to address their health needs and priorities, and an increased sense of ownership of the project ( Dias & Gama, 2014 ; Israel et al., 2010 ). Finally, the participatory processes can stimulate the receptiveness of communities to policies and recommendations that arise from the research results—but engaging with policymakers can also be a key strategy for translating research into policy development and implementation ( Ogbe et al., 2018 ).

There is increasing recognition in the field of health research that community-engaged methods can be used throughout the research process (e.g., when developing the research question, designing and conducting the study, dissemination of findings) ( Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020 ). The volume of guidance documents for engaging communities and conducting participatory research has grown steadily in the past 40+ years. This trend has occurred in many countries and contexts. Further, some institutions now require stakeholder engagement as a condition of funding. Interest in collaborating in the research process is also growing among patients and the public ( Rutten et al., 2015 ). To move in this direction, both researchers and communities need to develop the capacity for conducting participatory research and need to be able to identify useful and appropriate methods suited to their partnerships, project goals, and processes.

PHR has integrated a wide range of existing research methods and approaches. While participatory research includes both quantitative and qualitative methods, these methods are often adapted for the participatory research process ( ICPHR, 2013 ), which sometimes raises questions about the methodological rigor of PHR. These challenges have been met by the recognition that PHR can be judged by its “adherence to validity criteria specific to participatory research approaches: participatory, intersubjective, contextual, catalytic, ethical, and empathic validity” ( ICPHR, 2013 , pp. 19–20). Another important remedy is the use of methods for engaging stakeholders and co-producing research that have developed along with the growing interest in participatory research. These methods reflect PHR’s diverse goals and the wide range of contexts in which it is conducted.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of participatory research methods for researchers new to PHR and for experienced PHR researchers seeking information about methods they have not used before. The authors selected a diverse range of participatory research methods and provide examples of how they can be used for different research goals (see Tables 1 –5). We derived our categories and examples from collective experience, the existing research methods literature, and through the iterative process described below. Our resulting categorization is not intended to provide a comprehensive catalog of methods. Further, we recognize that the selected categorization is just one way of organizing these methods and that in many, if not all, cases, these methods overlap and could be utilized in other ways and other phases of the research process.

Engagement and Capacity Building

The International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research (ICPHR) was founded in 2009 and is a scientific, nongovernmental network and a community of practice focused in part on synthesizing the knowledge and experience of PHR in different countries, addressing issues of quality, credibility, and impact ( ICPHR, 2020 , p. 3). Members meet annually to discuss issues of common concern and convene workgroups on specific topics and projects. This work originated at the ICPHR annual meeting in 2019. At that time, ICPHR members interested in PHR methods formed a working group on methods and discussed the need for sharing resources related to methods that were developed or adapted for participatory research and collaboration. The working group included faculty members from the United States, Portugal, and England whose work focused on implementing, advancing, and evaluating PHR methods. Having used and written about a wide variety of PHR methods (e.g., Dias et al., 2018 ; Dias & Gama, 2014 ; Harris, Booth, et al., 2018 ; Harris, Cook, et al., 2018 ; Harris et al., 2019 ; Jacquez et al., 2013 ; Smith et al., 2020 ; Vaughn et al., 2009 , 2016 ; Vaughn & DeJonckheere, 2019 ; Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020 ; Vaughn & Lohmueller, 2014 ; Zimmerman, 2021 ; Zimmerman et al., 2020 ), the authors began the process of developing this article by creating an annotated list of methods they were aware of and creating a matrix to identify different characteristics of these methods. Next, we grouped the methods into the domains presented here and then conducted literature reviews within each domain to identify additional methods and relevant literature, including foundational articles and more recent implementation studies. For each method, we refer readers to a select list of articles that highlight the background of each method and implementation examples.

Our overview of participatory methods is organized in five domains: 1) Engagement and capacity building; 2) Exploration and visioning; 3) Visual and narrative; 4) Mobilization; and 5) Evaluation. Below, we define each domain and provide examples of methods within each. We describe the type of method, typical goals for which the method is employed, participants engaged, and some strengths and weaknesses that users of these methods have identified. This summary is meant to orient readers to the types of methods employed and their potential uses and does not aim to provide any definitive description or assessment. We also include citations that provide examples of how the different types of methods have been used and urge readers who are learning about these methods to seek out the depth of information needed for their purposes by further exploring the literature.

Categorization of the methods into the five domains was conceived as a way to link each method to a collaborative goal rather than a specific stage in the research process, reflecting the flexibility to be useful at various research stages. For example, the community consultation provided by a Community Engagement Studio may be useful during research development to refine questions, identify ethical issues, and identify partners, but may also be useful later in the research process to address dissemination and translation. Similarly, a Photovoice project may help identify community priorities at the beginning of research or may spur advocacy or policy initiatives at later stages.

Domain: Engagement and Capacity Building

Engagement of stakeholders encompasses a spectrum of participation that ranges from one-off consultation and short-term intensive workshops to periodic engagement to ongoing and active collaboration and ownership of the research process. The establishment of partnerships and networks is more likely to build capacity for doing participatory research than one-off or short-term engagement. While engagement is often described as a process where academic researchers attempt to involve other stakeholders, in participatory research, communities may take the lead by identifying issues that require research and approaching academics and health practitioners to explore collaborations.

Researchers who are applying for funding often use one-off engagement at the research planning stage. At the planning stage, people with lived experience of a health condition may be asked to critique proposed research designs ( Shippee et al., 2015 ). Community engagement (CE) studios are one approach where focused engagement is used to obtain feedback on existing ideas for research ( Joosten et al., 2015 , 2018 ). In a brief (usually two hour) CE Studio session, a skilled and neutral moderator facilitates discussion between stakeholders and researchers with the aim of promoting co-learning and obtaining project-specific input that increases the relevance and acceptability of the proposed research. The contributions are used to refine research design, modify patient information and patient consent, and inform recruitment processes and patient compensation ( Shippee et al., 2015 ).

CBPR charettes , in contrast, aim for more intense engagement through facilitated, transdisciplinary workshops lasting for three to five days. Days may be split, or interspersed with small group work, to promote knowledge exchange and discourse on specific issues ( Kennedy, 2017 ). In CBPR, charrettes have been used to convene participants from diverse fields and knowledge bases, with the aim of identifying issues that need to be addressed through research, assessing the feasibility of proposed projects, and developing a plan that can be used as the basis of a more detailed roadmap for a transdisciplinary research project ( Samuel et al., 2018 ). These projects may be broader than clinical research, encompassing health and the environment, vulnerable groups, public health issues such as violence, community development and planning ( Kennedy, 2017 ; Smith et al., 2020 ). Charettes use a specific objective to build intergroup collaboration, which in turn serves to build capacity for developing longer-term partnerships ( Smith et al., 2020 ). They do this by leveraging participants’ expertise to set up Community Advisory Boards and establish governance and decision-making structures, while clarifying initial expectations and roles ( Samuel et al., 2018 ). Consistent participation in the charette and communication of charette activities to a wider stakeholder group are important in terms of fostering longer-term engagement.

Over the longer term, patient research networks (PRNs) enhance research relevance and usefulness throughout a clinical research study by coordinating patient involvement at different project stages, including recruiting participants for studies, partnering with researchers to coordinate the collection and analysis of data, and developing strategies for disseminating results. The common aim across patient research networks is to ensure that patients are included as partners across all stages, including their position in leadership and decision-making roles ( Marschhauser et al., 2021 ). One of the benefits of early engagement has been establishing what matters to patients when they take part in research ( Natafgi et al., 2019 ). Patient-powered research networks (PPRNs) share the aims of other PRN models, but also strive to create a national data and engagement infrastructure across diverse United States health institutions ( Marschhauser et al., 2021 ). PPRNs enlist patients to collect and share their data, primarily with academic researchers, in order to create large data sets. Individuals with one condition or a set of related conditions contribute self-reported data gathered via remote monitoring devices, or share data from their electronic health records, with the PPRN, which coordinates large-scale data collection for researchers ( Fleurence et al., 2014 ).

Community Advisory Boards (CABS) aim to solidify partnerships through deeper participation and ongoing stakeholder contribution to and co-production of research ( Dias et al., 2018 ; Pratt & Hyder, 2016 ). Successful partnerships engage people who are committed to reducing health disparities, for example, and who have reputations as doers and consensus makers ( Horowitz et al., 2011 ). Incorporating regular discussion where members can express concerns and negotiate conflict is key ( Rowe & Frewer, 2005 ), in addition to formal and informal training where different skills and expertise are shared. These activities can enable CAB members to recognise and value diverse opinions and skills while developing a shared purpose and solidarity, which further builds capacity and sustainability of the partnership ( Harris et al., 2019 ).

Domain: Exploration and Visioning

Participatory methods that we classified in the Exploration and Visioning domain support various stages of research development, such as community dialogue, stakeholder priority setting, developing research questions, and exploring the meaning, causes, or solutions to specific problems. All methods categorized in the Exploration and Visioning domain support a wide range of group involvement and are intended to benefit from relevant stakeholder representation across a group or system (e.g., patients, physicians, other healthcare providers, clinic administrators, staff, and family/community members for a research study about a chronic disease for which patients are seen in a specialty clinic).

An example of an Exploration and Visioning process method that can be used to support research development is the multi-stakeholder SEED Method ( Zimmerman et al., 2020 ; Zimmerman & Cook, 2021 ), which brings in multiple groups of patient and stakeholder participants in the research team, by creating “topic groups” that build conceptual models and develop research questions or strategies, and also through consultation such as focus groups or interviews. The SEED Method has been used to develop and prioritize research questions on lung cancer disparities ( Rafie et al., 2019 ), diet and behavioral management of diabetes and hypertension ( Zimmerman et al., 2017 ), and to develop strategies for addressing the opioid crisis and working with stakeholders to develop and implement action plans ( Zimmerman et al., 2020 ).

Concept mapping methodology is a mixed-methods research approach that integrates qualitative and quantitative data collection methods of brainstorming, card sorting, and ratings with the multivariate statistical techniques of multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis to create a data-driven visual representation of thoughts or ideas of a group ( Kane & Trochim, 2007 ; Trochim, 1989 ). Concept mapping ( Jackson & Trochim, 2002 ; Rosas & Kane, 2012 ) works well within a participatory framework because of the structured steps that include diverse perspectives of multiple constituencies within a group or community ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ). Concept mapping has been used widely in PHR as a foundation for evidence-based action planning or program and policy development that can be co-created with stakeholders. For instance, Szaflarski and colleagues (2015) used concept mapping to explore HIV-related stigma in the Cincinnati Black Faith community, and Ahmad et al. (2012) used concept mapping methodology working with South Asian immigrant women to identify barriers to mammography and solutions. Methodological studies support the validity and utility of concept mapping ( Jackson & Trochim, 2002 ; Rosas & Kane, 2012 ).

Many of the Exploration and Visioning methods are intended to engage large groups in a process where all stakeholders can participate and be heard, with an emphasis on action planning and areas of agreement/consensus (e.g., community forums, Future Search Conference, Group Level Assessment, World Café). For instance, Future Search Conference (FSC) is a large-group methodology that brings a whole system into the room to work on a task-focused agenda ( Serrat, 2017 ; Weisbord & Janoff, 2000 , 2010 ). FSCs have been used in a variety of settings with successful results, including enhanced participant involvement and awareness, confirmation of mutual values, and increased commitment to future action ( Magnus et al., 2016 ). FSCs are most commonly used in organizational settings to facilitate collective strategic planning and visioning, leaving opportunities for wider usage in PHR.

The World Café invites stakeholders to engage in small group discussions by rotating tables where specific questions and ideas are discussed and then shared with the larger group. Conversations are encouraged through a social café style setting and the use of Appreciative Inquiry. Although conversations take place in small groups, a relatively large number of people can come together at one World Café event ( Fouché & Light, 2011 ). MacFarlane et al. (2017) held World Cafés with community organizations, community participants, academics, clinicians, and health service planners/policy makers in Ireland to prioritize research questions for a primary health care research group. The two sessions engaged 63 participants in all. They also report on a series of five World Cafes held in the U.S. with refugee and immigrant communities, each with approximately 45 to 55 participants, to develop research questions on diabetes mellitus.

Another Exploration and Visioning method is Group Level Assessment (GLA) . Qualitative and participatory, GLA is intended for research and evaluation with large groups of stakeholders who have an equal voice in data generation, data analysis, and action planning ( Vaughn & DeJonckheere, 2019 ; Vaughn & Lohmueller, 2014 ). GLA utilizes an action-based, collaborative research process and is popular across a wide variety of disciplines to assess and explore various topics. GLA proceeds through seven structured steps that vary in terms of individual, small group, and large group activities: 1) Climate Setting; 2) Generating; 3) Appreciating; 4) Reflecting; 5) Understanding; 6) Selecting; and 7) Action. GLA is useful across a variety of settings and allows diverse stakeholders to work together to identify, prioritize, and take action about issues of importance ( K. E. Graham et al., 2015 ; Vaughn et al., 2011 ). In the health arena, examples where GLA has been used include factors influencing the use of physiological monitors for hospitalized children ( Schondelmeyer et al., 2019 ); African American fathers’ perceptions of involvement in the pediatric medical home ( Bignall et al., 2018 ); and communication when caring for children with limited English proficiency during inpatient hospital stays ( Choe et al., 2019 ).

Domain: Visual and Narrative

The Visual and Narrative domain includes participatory research methods that use visual and narrative approaches to data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The methods in this domain generally emphasize the sharing and co-production of stakeholder experiences and ideas through alternative, multimodal approaches to data collection and interpretation. Participatory visual and narrative methods are guided by stakeholder interests and priorities, “putting the methods literally in the hands of participants themselves and allowing for greater access to social research knowledge beyond the academy” ( Gubrium et al., 2016 , p. 13).

Mapping methods include participatory GIS mapping, asset mapping, food mapping, and other techniques that engage the public in visual mapping, planning, and decision making related to social and cultural environments/contexts. Participatory mapping has been used in a wide variety of disciplines to frame health, educational, and organizational issues within the context of spatial information (e.g., understanding public safety and community violence, informing the development of place-based interventions, mapping the “hot spots” of disease transmission) and can be a powerful approach to engaging underrepresented communities in learning, decision making, planning, and advocacy ( S. R. Graham et al., 2011 ; Larrain & McCall, 2019 ; Letsela et al., 2018 ).

Participatory methods such as Photovoice and Videovoice incorporate photography and/or video into data collection and analysis and can promote self-reflection, dialogue, collaboration, power sharing, and voice among stakeholders who are normally not involved in research ( Gubrium & Harper, 2016 ; Lorenz & Kolb, 2009 ; Packard, 2008 ). Photovoice and Videovoice go beyond the written word and have the potential to engage people with varying literacy levels, different languages, ages, and cognitive abilities. Photovoice is a well-known and widely-used participatory visual method that engages community members by utilizing photography to identify community strengths and challenges ( Catalani & Minkler, 2010 ; Wang, 2006 ; Wang & Burris, 1997 ). Reflection and dialogue based on the photographs lead to community-identified priorities and ultimately a platform for advocacy and social action.

Participatory methods such as digital storytelling, participatory oral history, and participatory theatre-based methods emphasize the narrative aspect of data collection and interpretation. They encourage personal and social change through the sharing of stories and personal and public narrative. Such methods can be used to prompt community dialogue and engagement in decision-making processes ( Aranda & Street, 2001 ; Harper et al., 2004 ). A “storied approach to research” provides opportunities for stakeholder participation in research by drawing on lived experiences and diverse perspectives ( Goodley & Clough, 2004 , p. 331). Digital storytelling is used to capture participants’ lived experiences and engage them in making meaning of that experience (e.g., Carlson et al., 2021 ; Fiddian-Green et al., 2019 ).

Participatory art-making methods, including collage, drawing, tapestry, murals, and mandalas, utilize arts-based modalities to evoke diverse expression and tap into the “everyday knowledge,” multiple ways of knowing, and creativity of stakeholders ( Swantz, 2008 , p. 38). In these participatory art-making methods, stakeholders engage in creating and interpreting art as a form of data collection and analysis ( Carter & Ford, 2013 ; Coemans & Hannes, 2017 ; Jones & Leavy, 2014 ; Van der Vaart et al., 2018 ). For instance, Yuen (2016) used collage as a method of inquiry collaborating with Aboriginal women to explore the meaning of leisure and their experiences of healing, and Dutton et al. (2019) used biographical collage with Inuit women to foster capacity building and as a decolonizing process. Mental health studies on anxiety and depression have also used the creation of mandalas in research ( Henderson et al., 2007 ; Lee, 2018 ; Palmer et al., 2014 ).

Domain: Mobilization

Research methods that we classified in the Mobilization domain are those that mobilize action in participatory research by providing tools for decision making, action planning, translation, policy change, and dissemination. All methods categorized in this section provide a specific framework for mobilization that reflects the perspectives and priorities of diverse stakeholders. This domain includes Boot Camp Translation, which aims to promote the translation of evidence-based practices by creating community-focused messages and communication tools. Methods focused on decision making included deliberative methods and the Delphi Process, which bring together diverse stakeholders to reach consensus on important health-related issues. These methods can be used to identify and prioritize health spending, research priorities, and other normative decisions ( Burchardt, 2014 ).

Boot Camp Translation (BCT) , developed by the High Plains Research Network (HPRN), is a participatory process to “translate medical information and clinical guidelines into concepts and messages that are understandable, meaningful, and engaging to community members” ( Zittleman et al., 2021 , p. 339). Working together using a CBPR approach and facilitation team model, community members, researchers, and health experts learn about the health issue and create new paths for community engagement, with an emphasis on creating culturally-relevant messages and changing the local conversation. BCT has been used to address a variety of health issues (e.g., colon cancer screening, asthma, diabetes self-management, high blood pressure, and opioid use disorder and treatment) ( Allison et al., 2014 ; Zittleman et al., 2021 ). By digging into patient perspectives, the BCT process helps create communication that resonates with communities. For example, in a patient-centered medical homes project, BCT participants engaged in appreciative inquiry to better understand aspects that are salient to patients and tailored messages around those components ( Allison et al., 2014 ). Generally, the BCT process takes 4 to 12 months, including education for participants on the health topic, brainstorming, developing key messages, and dissemination planning ( Norman et al., 2013 ).

A variety of participatory methods fall into the category of consensus approaches that bring diverse stakeholders together to deliberate and identify priorities. Deliberative methods promote informed discussion and consideration of different points of view on specific topics, leading to a decision or recommendation acceptable to all participants. Deliberation as research, Burchardt (2014) points out, generally aims to obtain the informed and considered judgements of participants through a process of public reasoning, with information provided to participants and an expectation that participants’ beliefs and values may change as a result of the deliberation exercise.

Deliberative participatory methods include citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, and citizens’ panels ( Abelson et al., 2003 ). The Deliberative Democracy Forum (DDF), developed by the Kettering Foundation, is one example. Procedures for conducting a DDF include several key steps such as framing sessions, facilitated forums (including deliberation), and identifying actions. Cheney et al. (2021) describe a project using DDF to identify community priorities and engage Latinx communities in Riverside, California. After a series of in-home meetings to identify community concerns, stakeholders participated in framing sessions to sort and categorize the community-identified issues. The four final categories that emerged from this process were developed into an Issue Book to help guide the deliberation step. Deliberation was held in four 90-minute forums with community members. Through the forums, community participants were able to reach a consensus on which topic had the most importance.

The Delphi process is another consensus method that is often used to elicit and prioritize stakeholder ideas for research-related issues (e.g., research agendas and questions, outcomes). The process involves repeated questioning of selected experts—generally through several rounds of surveys ( Hasson et al., 2000 ). Unlike many participatory methods, Delphi participants may provide their input anonymously via questionnaires, but in-person consensus meetings and workshops are also common. Although the Delphi process has been in use since the 1950s, it is more recently used in participatory research with stakeholders such as patients and service users and incorporated into participatory frameworks such as community-based participatory research or participatory action research. Used in participatory research, stakeholders may be involved beyond answering questionnaires, including collaboration on design and analysis aspects of the research. Fletcher and Marchildon (2014) discuss the Delphi Method’s use in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and the impact of anonymous participation on reducing power differentials among participants. Kezar and Maxey (2016) describe how the Delphi Method can be used in participatory research and introduce the idea of a change-oriented Delphi . The Delphi Process has been used in participatory research to elicit consensus on a wide variety of topics, such as research priorities for mental health ( Owens et al., 2008 ), cerebral palsy ( Gross et al., 2018 ), and self-management strategies for bipolar disorder ( Michalak et al., 2016 ). Khodyakov et al. (2017) used a modified online Delphi process to gain patients’ and professionals’ consensus on priorities for comparative effectiveness research on three health conditions. They assessed participants’ experiences using the online process and found that participants were willing to use the process again, felt it was easy to use, and had positive online discussion experiences.

Domain: Evaluation

Research methods in the Evaluation domain include participatory methods for evaluating partnerships and project processes or outcomes with stakeholders and program participants as active collaborators. Although participatory evaluation can be useful in many contexts, it is a particularly important method for assessing participatory research projects. It provides continuity with the core processes and values that undergird these projects and is well suited for assessing how project outcomes are linked to participatory processes. This is especially important because the distinctive values and processes of participatory research can create challenges for evaluators. For example, these processes increase the complexity inherent in identifying and measuring outcomes, which may occur more gradually than traditional health intervention projects and may include non-traditional outcomes (e.g., community empowerment) ( Springett, 2017 ). Participatory evaluation, therefore, requires a distinct approach to method and metrics, with stakeholder collaboration throughout. The Center for Community Health and Development (n.d.) also emphasizes the importance of making participatory evaluation part of a project from the beginning, so that “beneficiaries become the copilots of a project, making sure that their real needs and those of the community are recognized and addressed.”

Participatory evaluation approaches vary on key dimensions such as who is engaged, how, and for what purpose. Cousins and Whitmore (1998) distinguished between participatory evaluation that supports practical decision making and problem solving (practical participatory evaluation) and that which focuses on empowerment of those who are less powerful or oppressed (transformative participatory evaluation). Our table groups different approaches together under the label participatory evaluation, but we acknowledge that there are many different types and that evaluation teams have many options regarding approach, project design, governance, engagement, and data collection. For example, Fetterman (2019) distinguishes between collaborative, participatory, and empowerment evaluation approaches, based on who is in control of the evaluation process and the role of the evaluator. Chouinard and Milley (2018) reviewed 51 reports describing international participatory evaluation projects. They report that governance arrangements often took the form of stakeholder inclusion in steering committees, research teams, design workshops, task forces and committees, consultation, and participatory planning processes. In addition to these governance arrangements, collaborative evaluation work often occurred through events and meetings, such as workshops, trainings, and other events focused on project activities such as identifying questions, building stakeholder capacity, and interpreting data.

Partnership evaluation puts the focus on the process and outcomes of community-based participatory research by assessing partnership functioning and ability to meet objectives (Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center, n.d.). The Community-Based Participatory Research Conceptual Model developed by the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research (UNM-CPR) and University of Washington’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (UWIWRI) provides a conceptual evaluation model that focuses on contexts, group dynamics, research and intervention designs, and outcomes. The model provides specific constructs within each of these levels, but also posits the processes and practices that may influence CBPR outcomes ( Wallerstein et al., 2008 ). Oetzel et al. (2015) validated the psychometric properties of 22 measures related to the CBPR model, including proximal, intermediate, and distal outcome measures. The model was tested by a sample of CBPR partnerships and participants verified and expanded upon previous concepts ( Belone et al., 2016 ), resulting in an evaluation framework that highlights important influences at different levels of the socio-ecological model (e.g., individual, group, community) and by different actors (e.g., community and university). Important factors include socio-economic, cultural, and historical contexts; community capacity and university readiness; trust; reflection; power relations; and mutual learning ( Roura et al., 2021 ). A study of 294 participatory research projects examined the relationship between contextual and partnership practices and partnership outcomes, identifying specific practices that were associated with project outcomes ( Duran et al., 2019 ). The conceptual model and a repository of evaluation tools are available at the Engage for Equity website ( Engage for Equity, 2021 ). An example of application of the model is provided by the Rochester Healthy Community Partnership (RHCP). RHCP’s evaluation process moved through steps of: 1) development of a partnership timeline; 2) facilitated discussion of the CBPR conceptual model to discuss partnership constructs and consider how the constructs influenced the partnership’s work; 3) interviews and surveys using adapted instruments guided by the CBPR conceptual model; and 4) participatory data analysis ( Reese et al., 2019 ).

Ripple Effects Mapping (REM) is a retrospective, qualitative evaluation approach that brings together project stakeholders to map the chain of effects of a program or collaboration in complex, real-life settings ( Chazdon et al., 2017 ). Four essential components of REM include Appreciative Inquiry, a participatory approach, interactive group interviewing and reflection, and radiant thinking (Mind Mapping) ( Chazdon & Langan, 2017 ). Evaluations often incorporate the Community Capitals Framework (CCF) and employ approaches such as “web mapping” and “in-depth rippling.” REM has been used in a variety of fields. Welborn et al. (2016) used it in six project sites to assess a civic dialog process that engaged residents to explore poverty in their community and act on identified concerns. They concluded that the process was easy for participants to understand and provided real-time deliberation about responses. They also found that the process helped participants recognize and appreciate program impacts, spurring new energy among the groups. Washburn et al. (2020) used REM to evaluate a health education program and capture program impacts beyond participant behavior change to identify community-level ripple effects. Others have used similar approaches to capture ripple effects of participatory research ( Dias et al., 2021 ; Zimmerman et al., 2019 ).

Despite its positive contributions to research and partnership, conducting PHR also entails many challenges. Since a community is not a purely geopolitical nor homogeneous entity, collaboratively defining who comprises the community and its stakeholders is a critical first step that has consequences throughout the project ( MacQueen et al., 2001 ; Roura et al., 2021 ). Although the active participation of community partners and stakeholders is essential to PHR, managing power relations, conflicts of interests, and diverse perspectives requires attention, time, and continuous dialogue and negotiation efforts throughout the research process to ensure equitable involvement of all partners (both academic and non-academic) ( Dias et al., 2018 ; Newman et al., 2011 ). Additionally, conducting participatory research involves working closely with non-academic partners with different backgrounds and competencies regarding research activities, such as data collection and analysis. In practice, it is often difficult to ensure equitable involvement of different partners throughout project activities ( Dias & Gama, 2014 ; Ramsden et al., 2010 ). Differences in competencies, commitment, interests, motivations, expectations, and the need for continued adjustments to the project add to the necessary commitment of time and resources ( Abma et al., 2019 ).

Using research methods developed or adapted for stakeholder engagement and collaborative research does not guarantee that these challenges will be reduced or eliminated, but should provide the foundation needed to plan for and implement strategies to address these issues. We have highlighted a range of methods for: 1) collaborative participation in the processes of engaging stakeholders and building capacity; 2) facilitating group processes for exploration, dialogue, priority setting, and question development; 3) sharing and co-production of stakeholder experiences and ideas through alternative, multimodal approaches to data collection and interpretation; 4) mobilizing for decision making, action planning, translation, policy change, and dissemination; and 5) evaluating participatory research. Researchers and their partners must evaluate the suitability of PHR methods for their project goals and purposes based on available resources (e.g., time, expertise, funding) and assess relevant tradeoffs. For example, while more time consuming, longer-term engagement may help build trust and capacity and is critical to achieving co-production of research. However, shorter-term engagement may be a better fit for some projects or a starting point for those new to PHR.

Limitations

This article was prepared largely for other researchers seeking to familiarize themselves with a range of PHR methods and did not involve collaboration with different types of stakeholders; however, we welcome feedback from all stakeholders as well as suggestions related to methods that were not covered here. This overview contains examples in each of the five domains presented and does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of relevant methods. In addition, we decided to limit the scope to methods and have not included the many useful tools that are available for PHR. Beyond noting some of the strengths and challenges related to each method that have been reported in the literature, we did not evaluate the effectiveness of the methods, nor did we discuss ethical challenges associated with the methods. Our categorization of methods into the five domains is meant to help readers match partnership and project goals with available methods, but we fully acknowledge that the methods presented here are useful in multiple contexts and to accomplish a variety of goals.

Conclusion and Implications for Future Research

Research methods can be effectively implemented in participatory ways. It is key to nurture a collaborative environment that embodies PHR principles, such as the active engagement of stakeholders and communities in the conceptualization of research questions and in the choice of methodological approaches. The promotion of all partners’ engagement encourages openness and opportunity for continuous dialogue, exchange of knowledge, respect and trust, and self-reflexivity. Echoing the words of Wallerstein (2020) , “the commitment to practice participatory methods is critically important to ensure genuine engagement” as we collectively work towards achieving health and social justice and eliminating inequities. Opportunities for future research include process and outcome evaluation of participatory health research using established and emerging participatory research methods.

Exploration and Visioning

Visual and Narrative

Mobilization

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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.
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• 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.
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• Borda, Orlando Fals . 2008. “The Application of the Social Sciences’ Contemporary Issues to Work on Participatory Action Research.” Human Organization 67 (4): 359.
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• 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.
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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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