Participatory research methods
Research which centres the experiences of people who are under-represented is not new, but is increasingly important as power imbalances grow more stark. Participatory research is a good place to start.
Last week, I gave a workshop on participatory research methods. It was for colleagues within my institution who are participation-curious. While deciding which aspects of the topic I wanted to talk about, I spent some time considering why I think it’s important to use participatory methods, and also a little time refreshing my own understanding of the history and various strands of participatory research. As these things go, my attempt to make sense for myself, and to distil a huge topic down to a small and accessible introduction, left me with a lot of extra thoughts. What you’ll read below is a reflection on participatory research from my own perspective, but also put lightly into the context of the history of participatory research methods and traditions of various kinds. This is a personal reflection, which satisfies my desire to follow some paths I decided not to take when I was developing the workshop I gave last week. Regardless of the personal itch it scratches, I think it should have some use for others who are also a little participation-curious. It doesn’t replace scholarly work on various participatory research methods, and I provide a couple references at the end if you’re interested in going deeper.
What is participatory research?
What do I understand participatory research to be? In terms of my experience of methods in participatory research, I think I’ve been raised in the intersection of several different terms: participatory research, participatory action research, action research, and participatory design. I definitely don’t come from a straight PR background (more in a moment on what that might mean). I think that’s true of a lot of people these days, especially if they don’t come from one of the “classical” (it’s amusing to call anything about PR classical, but here we are) PR fields like adult education or community-based development.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What about all those parentheses, then? What are these asides about how amusing it is to think of participatory research as being classical or traditional? And indeed, what is participatory research at all, in the context of this text?
In short, what is participatory research, in my own estimation, without first resorting to references and definitions? What do I mean when I casually talk about participatory research?
Participatory research is research which de-centres the academic or conventionally-trained researcher and centres the experiences of the people the research is about (or better yet, not about, but with). This differs from many conventional forms of social science research in that it is not about extraction, but about co-creation. This attitude is becoming increasingly common.
If I offer myself the chance to resort to references and definitions, there are several different fields and methods which include the term “participatory.” The thing that’s simply called “Participatory Research” comes out of work in global majority countries, back in the 1970s and 80s. In that case, there’s a heavy influence by people like Paulo Freire (perhaps most known for the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed) who were working at the same time on radical approaches to education. As Budd Hall, the apparent originator of the term “participatory research,” tells it in a 2005 reflection/retrospective, the term was first used to describe “a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge” which “combine[d] social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process” (2005, p.1).
What does that mean, and again, what about the parenthetical asides?
The form of participatory research Hall describes originates, in Hall’s own telling, from the early post-colonial era in Tanzania, with an interest in not only how education can change lives, but the importance of meeting people where they are. Hall recounts a story about the limitations of his attempts to assess adult educational needs in villages through survey-based research. Through a slow process of seeing the limits of blunt research methods, Hall and his contemporaries arrived at the realization that research about particular groups should involve more active participation from those groups.
This is an origin story for what I’ve slightly ironically been terming “classical” or “straight” participatory research so far. It can only be called those things because it has come so far in terms of recognition and acceptance since its beginnings in 1970s Tanzania. In its attitude towards inclusion, it is anything but traditional, anything but conventional. Participatory research began in, and continued in, a context of radical emancipation through education. The commitments grounding PR are about shifting power and asking people to share their experiences and life-worlds on a basis which puts them in control of the questions being studied, and aiming to give something back. PR, in short, started its life as something profoundly radical.
This is often the way with research methods. What starts as an experiment gains legitimacy as it gains popularity, but also becomes more rigid, more fixed, and has more hoops to jump through in order to be classified as a proper or good implementation of this or that method. Why should users of the methods allow them to become rigid? Because rigidity can be a pathway to recognition by funding bodies, by universities, by the anonymous person reviewing your journal article. The codification of methods confers legitimacy that greases the slide a little.
And this is an interesting problem in participatory forms of research. Participatory research methods are fundamentally about moving control out of the space of academic research and into the life-worlds of the people whose lives are impacted by the research and its potential outcomes. Participatory research methods need to adapt to their context.
This is in part where all the other terms come in. They have parallel histories, and cannot be said to be derivatives of the PR I’ve just described. They also developed throughout the 20th century, in different places, with other areas of specialization, and provide hooks which are used by other fields of study to achieve similar ends to those PR aims for in (most notably) adult education. Through the different histories and disciplinary homes of these other terms, it's possible to see tensions and commitments which differ from PR, while still being grounded in similar values.
Other terms
I’ve mentioned a number of other terms that are at home in the same sorts of methodological approaches as participatory research. I won’t go with any detail into action research (AR) and its cousin, participatory action research (PAR). They have their own specificities and their own (contested) histories, not least of all because their apparent originators are long gone, while Hall is still available to recollect the early days of PR.
The one term I’d like to go a little deeper with is participatory design (PD), because it was the framing for my first experiences of research which is hinged on participation. In fact, the first thing I ever read which articulated a philosophy and rationale for participatory design was an article by Judith Gregory, titled “Scandinavian Approaches to Participatory Design.”
Gregory places specifically Scandinavian approaches to participatory design into a broad group of practices which have been used both in Scandinavia and elsewhere, creating a characterization of how the Scandinavian approaches differ from others. As she writes, “Scandinavian participatory design practices are not distinguished by particular methods but rather by political commitments to societal concerns and relationships with participating users and communities” (2003, p.63). Maybe it’s becoming obvious why I’ve chosen to cover Gregory’s view of participatory design here, over many other fine texts on the topic. Gregory highlights very clearly that the distinguishing feature of Scandinavian participatory design is a commitment to democracy, and to personal and structural change.
While participatory design is historically rooted in the development of computation and information systems, there is a kinship between what Gregory describes and what Hall describes of PR. This is not shocking. Both PR and PD are rooted in commitments to inclusion, participation, and the idea that the location of power (or if not power, then at least a degree of decision-making) needs to shift in favour of people who will be impacted by decisions, whether those are policy decisions, curriculum decisions, or design decisions.
Why any participatory research methods?
“Nothing about us without us” is one of the main reasons I fall back on when explaining the importance of participation-forward research methods. If we want to do research which concerns people in currently or historically marginalized groups, we (this is the “we” of professional researchers, but also the “we” of anyone tasked with learning, on some professional basis, about particular groups of people) need to not be coming in with the idea that we have the better ability to understand what’s going on.
Research which doesn’t involve its “subjects” in designing the questions can only go so far – there’s a risk of missing things that are important, but fall outside the researcher’s own frame of reference. Or, as I put it in the workshop that began this whole reflection, the people receiving the pointy end of the stick generally have a better understanding of the shape and functioning of the stick. If we want to study the stick, those with first-hand knowledge of it should be in the lead.
References
Mentioned here:
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed.
Gregory, J. (2003). Scandinavian approaches to participatory design. International Journal of Engineering Education, 19(1), 62-74.
Further reading:
Bergold, J., & Thomas, S. (2012). Participatory research methods: A methodological approach in motion. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 191-222.
Robertson, T., & Simonsen, J. (2012). Participatory design. Routledge international handbook of participatory design, 1(10.4324), 9780203108543.
