Participatory approaches to research and evaluation intentionally include
the people and groups who are most affected by an inquiry in the design
and execution of the process. Participatory forms of research and evaluation
help to ensure that the methods and findings reflect the perspectives,
cultures, priorities, or concerns of those who are being studied. Because
students, parents, community members, or other stakeholders are given
active roles in a participatory research or evaluation process—and therefore
roles in producing new knowledge or insights about their school,
organization, or community—participatory research is a foundational and
widely used strategy in organizing, engagement, and equity work.
participatory approaches to research and evaluation can be organized into
three broad categories:
1. Participatory research is typically conducted by academics and
other professional researchers who involve or collaborate with the
individuals and groups that would have traditionally been
considered the “subjects” of a study. The primary intention of
many formal forms of participatory research—such as projects
supported by academic institutions or philanthropic foundations—
are to make a contribution to expanding knowledge in a scholarly
or professional field, rather than directly change the communities,
organizations, or groups being studied.
2. Participatory action research (commonly abbreviated as PAR) is
intended to study and change a particular community,
neighborhood, school, organization, group, or team. Participatory
action research might be used to shape the design of a new
initiative, inform the execution of an organizing campaign, provide
evidence supporting a particular political position, or increase
understanding of a local issue or problem. Participatory action
research initiatives are typically designed and led by local
practitioners and community members, though they may
collaborate with professional researchers and evaluators on both
the design and execution of the process.
3. Participatory evaluation (PE) is used to assess the effectiveness or
impact of a program, process, or plan either during or after
implementation. Participatory evaluations are either conducted by
professional evaluators who utilize a participatory approach, or they
are designed and led by local practitioners and community members
who may or may not collaborate with professional evaluators.
Participatory approaches to research, action research, and evaluation are
based on similar philosophies, theories, and methods. For example, they
start with many of the same underlying assumptions, such as:
▪ People don’t need advanced degrees or professional credentials to
conduct valuable research.
▪ All groups and cultures have their own biases, including
professional researchers and evaluators who are trying to remain
“neutral” or “objective” observers.
▪ Everyone can contribute valuable expertise, insights, and
knowledge to a research or evaluation process.
▪ Those who are closest to an issue, problem, or program generally
know the most about it.
▪ The involvement of diverse participants with different
perspectives can help researchers, evaluators, practitioners, and
community members produce insights that are less biased and
closer to the truth.
Values:
To value knowledges that have been historically marginalized and
delegitimized (i.e., youth, prisoner, immigrant) alongside traditionally
recognized knowledges (i.e., scholarly).
· To share the various knowledges and resources held by individual members
of the
research collective, across the collective, so members can participate as
equally as possible.
· To collaboratively decide appropriate research questions, design, methods
and analysis as well as useful research products.
· To create a research space where individuals and the collective can express
their multiplicity and use this multiplicity to inform research questions, design
and analyses.
· To encourage creative risk-taking in the interest of generating new
knowledge (i.e., understanding individuals and the collective to be “under
construction” with ideas and opinions that are in formation, expected to grow,
etc.).
· To attend theoretically and practically to issues of power and vulnerability
within the collective and created by the research. To strategically work the
power within the group when necessary to benefit both individual and
collective needs/agendas
· To excavate and explore disagreements rather than smooth them over in the
interest of consensus (as they often provide insight into larger social/political
dynamics that are informing the data).
· To use a variety of methods to enable interconnected analyses at the
individual, social, cultural, and institutional levels.
· To conceive of action on multiple levels over the course of the PAR project.
· To think through consequences of research and actions.
· To an ongoing negotiation of conditions of collaboration; building research
relationships over-time.
