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.

Distanciation in participatory research

In this post I shall be discussing the rather positivist concept of distanciation. While I did argue that positivist research is outdated and inadequate for the purposes of studying human action, there are some aspects, when used in conjunction with more essentially social concepts, that are helpful.

It has been theorized by multiple authors that interpretation of a certain context surpasses the limitations imposed by simply understanding a context. This type of interpretation has been termed the ‘hermeneutical function of distanciation’. The concept of distanciation is important to participatory research as it allows the researcher to find things, such as patterns of behaviour, they could not in a state of subjective empathy.

By adopting the concept of distanciation in their research, the PR practitioner may be able to discover patterns that occur across different contexts that they would not be able to find if they were situated within on particular context; in other words, when the research is subjective and empathizes with one certain community – this is also known as Verstehen. Distanciation also allows the researcher to ask questions and develop perspectives of the ‘bigger picture’ and to gain an understanding as to why intentional actions are performed in the context they are conducting their research in.

Distanciation does not only mean that the researcher places themselves outside of the present context; participatory researchers also make use of temporal-distanciation, which gives us, as it has been stated, “the benefit of hindsight”. This temporal-distanciation allows the PR researcher to view the current context in relation to the historical context of the community. It also allows the researcher to have a better understanding of the causal influences of events and patterns (that these events comprise) and how these patterns could be linked across time.

By distancing themselves from the participants and the context of the research, the participatory researcher has a greater possibility of understanding why participants perform certain actions, such as rituals, ceremonies, and superstitions. As the actor often doesn't know why (as in they do not know the reason for their action) they do the action, as they are merely conforming to conventional practices within their community, asking them directly why they do something is not the surest method of the researcher gaining a true understanding of the participant’s reasoning. Thus, as it has been suggested, distanciation has the ability to reveal the role of convention and tradition in the crafting of action.

Now that a basic theoretical overview on the participatory research approach has been in the last ten or so posts, I shall soon be moving onto a discussion concerning the ontological and epistemological views that are held within the PR approach. Stay tuned for more : }

Praxis: action <-> research

In this post I will be talking about the concept of praxis. In short, praxis means action through research, and research through action (thus, the funny little <-> arrows in the title). This is one of the main ideals of participatory research, and is also underlying to participatory action research - which is PR but with a focus on action. However, that's a somewhat different approach - but the concept is still applicable here. Praxis, as we will see, is closely linked to the concept of conscientization which was discussed previously.

In contrast to mainstream scientific method, which attempts to control the effects of the researcher’s presence (as much as possible to the extent that the research is not there at all), the PR approach views the effects that a researcher has on the research intervention as something that is impossible to deny or overcome, and thus researcher’s effect on the intervention should be taken into account.

Practitioners of the PR approach suggest that just be asking a person questions, there is a possibility to invoke within them different ways to view a specific situation. This type of thinking may have a ‘reflexive effect’ on the research participators; the term reflexive  here is closely linked to the concept of conscientization, in that it refers to the way in which the research process is conducted can have an influence upon the context of the research.

Followers of the participatory research approach also believe that the entire research process is reflexive in that the theories developed and the outcomes of research projects influence our perception of what possible actions are available to take. Similarly, they believe that when participants (either an individual or members of a community) are involved in a research process they develop a self-understanding which has a possibility to affect the actions they may take.

The process involved in an individual or a community attempting to analyze their own problems is seen by practitioners of the PR approach as the beginning of a possible path to action.

Participatory researchers attempt to harness this reflexivity and use it as a vehicle of change. The interactive relationship that exists between research and action is called ‘praxis’. Thus, praxis can be defined as a form of social intervention that is at one and the same time an idea and an action.

It has been suggested that for praxis to be possible, not only must theory illuminate the lived experience of progressive social groups, it must also be illuminated by their struggles. This can be extended to suggest that PR researchers using the concept of praxis should be open-ended, non-dogmatic, informing, grounded in everyday life events, and have a desire to better those some researchers term the ‘dispossessed’.

For persons, as autonomous beings, have a moral right to participate in decisions that claim to generate knowledge about them… such a right protects them… from being managed and manipulated… the moral principle of respect for persons is most fully honoured when power is shared not only in the application… but also in the generation of knowledge. 

In the next post, I will be discussing the concepts of distaciation and empathetic understanding (also known as Verstehen). 

Concept of 'Local Knowledge' in participatory research

In the last post I discussed the concepts of conscientization and control and empowerment; all of these concepts are intricately interrelated, and thus they may seem similar or overlapping at certain points. In this post, I will be talking about the concept and use of local knowledge in participatory research. This is one of the core concepts of this approach, and thus careful consideration should be payed to it.

Local knowledge can be defined as a cumulative body of knowledge, know-how, practices, and presentations maintained and developed by peoples in a specific context”.

One of the central processes in the PR approach to conducting research interventions is accessing a community’s or an individual’s local knowledge, which the participators of the research possess; this knowledge is based on their daily practices and experiences in their own specific context and so knowledge which is essential to their survival in this context.

According to participatory researchers when researchers acknowledge and make use of local knowledge they fulfill two functions:

Firstly, concerning the participation of the research, (i.e. the community or individuals in a community), by using knowledge and resources that they already have and know about, they are less likely to be dependent on and controlled by external agencies, such as resources and knowledge; this also contributes to the success of the research, as well as the sustainability of the intervention.  The significance of this point can be highlighted by looking again at the social orientated approach to viewing human action: this approach holds the view that human action can only be fully understood when the social, historical, and cultural context of the human who performs the action is also understood.

Secondly, by the researchers acknowledging this local knowledge, there is a possibility of shirting the balance of power away from the researcher. By using knowledge that the participants possess as opposed to knowledge possessed by the researchers, the researchers themselves are no longer in possession of the definitive perspective. This shift in the power dynamic has consequences for the outcome of the knowledge produced by the research; the participants are able to voice their own perspectives by proxy of the research publication, as well as influencing the possibility for changes in the future.

Tapping into the community’s local resources is essential if the research interventions aim to be thorough, well grounded, and within the grasp of the communities current abilities and potential abilities.

However, it must be mentioned that the communities which are the target of the research intervention are not the only entities which possess local knowledge. The researchers themselves also possess their own; a type of local knowledge that makes them competent in their own context. Practitioners of the PR approach are required to understand that their ways of doing and understand things are not more intrinsically correct that those belonging to the communities they are working with.

Participatory Research

Finally, we are able to discuss the actual topic of this blog – the participatory research approach. In the previous posts, I have discussed the theory that has led up to this point; the inadequacy of the positivistic approach, and the essentially social nature of human activity. However, before a discussion on what participatory research is, a definition of what participation is must be established.

There are many definitions of ‘participation’ to be found, but for the purpose of this report, participation shall be defined as “people’s involvement in decision making about what should be done and how, in implementation of the project, in sharing in the benefits of a project, and in evaluation of the project”.

Participatory research has emerged as an alternative to positivistic systems of knowledge production by challenging some of the core values of the traditional, mainstream, social science research methodology. The core values that participatory challenges are the belief in researchers must be neutral, objective, and value-free. Rather, the practitioners of the participatory research approach recognise average people as researchers themselves; researchers in pursuit of answers to the questions of their daily lives, and their own problems. In addition, research projects and strategies which place emphasis on participation are gaining increasing respect and attention, primarily in health research, in both developed and developing nations. In traditional research, such as that conducted within the positivistic domain, it is too often the case that the conclusions and recommendations made have been inappropriate to the context; the main cause of this is the failure to take into account the local priorities, processes and perspectives.  In stark contrast, the participatory approach places emphasis on a ‘bottom-up’ approach where there is a focus on locally defined priorities and local perspectives. This involvement of local people as participants in the research process has been shown to enhance the effectiveness of the research as well as to save money and time in the long term.

As participatory research places such an emphasis on the ‘local’, it is no surprise that the methods used in participatory research are designed to bring the researcher to understand the specific qualities of a given context or person and the experiences, issues, and problems that are unique to that context or person. What is meant by the term ‘understand’ in the previous statement is that the researcher gains knowledge of an individual’s life, or even a situation in specific community, so that the researcher’s perspectives, in a sense, becomes that of the research participants. In other words, the methods designed for, and used in, participatory research attempt to maximise the empathy of the researcher.

Practitioners of the participatory research approach make use of some core concepts, such as, but not limited to: conscientization, control and empowerment, local knowledge, praxis (research as action) and context. The next posts will encompass some of these core concepts and will discuss how they are useful and essential to participatory research.

The social approach to understanding human action: part two

The previous post on the social approach to understanding human action introduced us to the topic, but ended off with a comment on intelligibility being necessary for understanding human action. This post will elucidate this comment and discuss it further.

Intelligibility, already mentioned in the previous section, is one of the most influential concepts that have arisen out of the social approaches to investigating the phenomenon of human action. Crudely put, intelligibility is the ability of others to understand and correctly interpret one’s actions, so that the intent or purpose behind the action is meaningfully understood by the audience witnessing the action. Furthermore, it has been suggested that “there is no such thing as a purely individual action”. What is meant by this assertion is that, beginning with learning, an individual is not innately born with the ability to act. While a human is born with certain behavioural abilities, such as the ability to sleep or suckle, this view maintains the dichotomous separation of mere behaviour compared to human action. Also, you learn from others around you, such as your parents, in the beginning, then your friends and peers and colleagues later in life. This social aspect of learning is made even more important by the very close association between language and actions. Some authors have stated that people “use language to do things, and not simply say things”.

Consequently, using language and finding it intelligible also requires a myriad of non-verbal skills which themselves have to be learned through careful observation and monitoring of other individuals, and practicing what they observe. For example, regardless of how well one can utter the language of car mechanics in its complete vocabulary, one will still not be able to repair their car until they learn to apply this language in practice. Therefore, the language you learn to use in specific contexts is closely connected with you learning how to perform activities that are socially acceptable and intelligible.

While positivism concentrated greatly on generating causal laws of human action, the more socially orientated approaches to human action is determined in finding out the social rules in play in a society which makes certain actions acceptable and intelligible. One can describe these types of social rules as “socially accepted conventions or norms which give meaning and expression to different types of social activity … they dictate what to do in specific situations and how to do it”. The reasoning behind these social conventions and norms is, however, not always known to the actors who perform them.

Some theorists have argued that individuals are not always aware of their own desires or beliefs – or what they think they believe may not even derive from the source they thought. Take, for example, Freud’s use of psychotherapy to reveal ‘hidden meanings’ and ‘deeper’ layers of thought which the patient did not know even exited in their mind – such as suppressed memories which influence one’s behaviour unconsciously. Human action, it is argued, can be thought of as having many of these deeper, hidden meanings. The social institutions of marriage, police, and religion, for example, often play a role in shaping an individual’s action, making it possible to an extent, even though they might not be aware of them.

Thus, to summarize all points thus far, three primary aspects of the nature of individual action were looked at, which, theorists who argue that human action is, at the very least partially social, suggest this to be so: Firstly, individuals must learn to act from others; secondly, people learn to act through learning to follow rules that are essentially social in nature; and finally, that social institutions must be understood first in order to understand and investigate human action.

In conclusion, it seems then that what human action is understood to be is highly dependent on which approach one follows: staunch followers of the positivistic philosophy still believe that empirical observation and causal  laws is the way to understand human action, while those who places emphasis on the social sphere believe human action is extremely complex and is understood by means of cultural and linguistic symbolism; those who are not so academically inclined, the common, the lay person’s view human action as something which is understandable when using commonsense.

Whilst these arguments are crucial to the development of what participatory research is, it is also important to highlight and discuss the type of approach used in relation to the research done. In other words, the next series of posts will look at a more detailed discussion on the participatory approach in relation to conducting research and how this approach is conceptualized within research.

The social approach to understanding human action: part one

As mentioned in the previous posts, the next couple of posts will be on more socially orientated approaches to human action paper and discuss how these critiques have led to more a socially orientated approach on how one may investigate the phenomenon of human action. Again, this section will be in multiple posts for two reasons: firstly, it’s a lot to dissect, and secondly, I’m quite fond of these theories. Thus, in this post, a thesis that human action is something which is essentially social, and that there is something fundamentally misconceived about the romanticised notion of the person being in total control of their own destiny, shall be critically discussed.

Supporters of this socially-orientated view argue that there is a difference between what they call ‘mere’ behaviour and human action .Consider the following example: the age-tested philosophical question of the difference between raising one’s arm, and one’s arm raising. One’s arm raising is merely a complex physiological process in the body, which would be useless information to anyone wanting to understand why they raised their arm. This view maintains that the agent of the action, the individual who raised their arm, did the action because of intent – his or her beliefs, reasons, and causes for the action. Using the example of raising an arm: if the man was raising his arm to get someone’s attention, such as a waitress in a restaurant, you would want to know why he did it, the reason, or intent, behind his action.

Therefore, one could say, under the perspective of this approach, what is identified as an action is usually a physical movement, at least at first. However, it is confirmed as an action because intent can be attached to it, which seems ‘natural’ to those observing the physical movement of the individual performing an action.

To illustrate this point further, looking yet again at the example of the winking man: if the man had a nervous tic that caused his body to produce a physical movement which seems very much like a blink, but only in one eye, and he explained his situation to the woman who thought he was winking at her, if she believes his reason behind the physical behaviour which can be interpreted as a wink, then she would no longer believe that his physical behaviour, the tic in his eye, was a wink at all. However, if the man did not inform her of his lack of control of his eye-lids opening and closing in his one eye, she could rightly interpret the behaviour as a wink, and the man winked at her intentionally. The point that the researchers are attempting to make through illustrating this example is that the description of the man’s actual eyelids closing and opening does not enable one to determine the intent (if there even was any) of his actions; therefore, we cannot determine why he did them. As authors have stated: “the judgment you make will depend on whether or not the behaviour is considered to be ‘purposeful’ in the sense that it may be understood with reference to intentional rather than psychological causes”.

Furthermore, this socially orientated approach to investigating human action also holds the view that actions cannot be coherently and accurately identified just based on the sensory observation of physical movement, nor can human actions be distinguished from one another by mere bodily movements. Take, for example, the simple instance of signing your name. There are many slight variations in the way that you sign your name every time you do it, but the action still accomplishes the same task, regardless of the variations. No matter how different your next signature will be from your last, or your next one, it still accomplishes the goal of signing your name. Equally so, any one specific physical behaviour may be consistent with many different and possibly contradictory actions. “Human bodies are in a constant state of flux”.

As a result, the important point about the man explaining his nervous tic to the woman who thought he was winking at her, was from his description of his actions that named either the purpose or belief that was behind the action itself. However, the reason the woman understood the man’s description of the reasons for his actions was because what he said was intelligible.

The next post shall continue on why intelligibility is so important when attempting to understand human action, as well as concluding why the social perspective is crucial to understanding human activity.