Challenges in participatory research

As hinted at in the last post, there are many challenges that participatory research and its practitioners must face. Mainly, these challenges have arisen because this research approach is relatively young and still needs to work out some 'kinks'. Some of these challenges will be discussed in the forthcoming post.

As some participatory researchers assert, it is common to hear of participatory researchers expressing frustration on the part of the community being apathetic towards the research process; thus, non-interest or apathy on behalf of the community is a challenge that PR practitioners must face. Participatory researchers also face a dilemma between building the capacity of the community as much as possible and report back to the research funders on the progress of the project; whilst educating funding agencies on the benefits of PR may make them more amiable to participatory research and true capacity building, this is currently a challenge PR faces.

Some of the core principles in PR, such as rapport building, often take a long time and thus can be constrained by lack of time and financial resources. Also concerning the financial resources of some PR phases, such as rapport building, are less likely to be supported by funders as they may not see it as an important part of the research process and thus it is up to the researchers to convince them of its importance. Although there is a focus on the ‘dispossessed’ (such as young children, the elderly, women) members of the community, many of the people do not end up being part of the research process and, subsequently, possibly vital sources of information are lost.

There may be participants who do not trust the researchers or feel that they have nothing to gain from participating in the activities and the overall research process often choose not to be involved in them at all, and, again, this is a loss of important information. Last in this itinerary of challenges, but not the least of them, is the issue of the lingering unbalanced power dynamics among the participants and the researchers, even if participation has been increased.

To conclude the posts i've written so far,  it is evident from what was discussed that the participatory approach to conducting research is, at its core, fundamentally different from other research approaches, specifically that of positivism. For example, in contrast to the principles and concepts of conducting positivistic research, such as the researcher being a distant, disconnected, neutral entity who only looks at empirical sources of information and indirectly reinforces unequal power dynamics in research, the participatory researcher believes in the principles of verstehen and distanciation, maximizing the role of the participants in the research in order to make use of their own local knowledge so as to decrease the power dynamics between researchers and participants and to maximize the chance of sustainable empowerment in the community they are working with.

The participatory approach also adopts some principles from the social approach to understand human action, such as the fact that individuals are not always aware of the meaning and reason behind their own actions and that in order to understand an action; one must understand the cultural and social conventions and institutions that indirectly determine the intent of the action. The ontological (nature of reality) and epistemological (nature of knowledge) structure of the participatory approach and subsequently how knowledge, using the participatory approach, is generated. Lastly, in this post, some of the challenges of the PR approach – which appeared to be primarily practical issues – were discussed. In the subsequent posts, I will be discussing certain participatory research techniques that can be used which maximize participant participation.