Having focused on techniques, we return in this section to the question of ap-proach by offering you some practical suggestions about how you can integrate participation into one or more stages of your own research project. A useful first step is simply to go out and talk to relevant organisations, community groups or individuals at an early stage in your research design, to see if collaboration is possible. If it is not, you are still likely to learn something useful from the meeting. If the response is enthusiastic, you can begin to involve participants at a number of stages in your research: (a) in setting priorities and generating research questions, (b) giving input into research design, (c) carrying out the research with you (perhaps as peer researchers), (d) analysing and making sense of information generated with you, and most importantly (e) using the findings to make changes themselves, or to campaign for others to make changes on their behalf. In Box 9.2, we summarise some ideas about how you might involve
‘Deep’ Participatory Action Research: how to involve participants at every stage of a project
Participation in project design and question development
1. Undertake web-based searches of organisations involved in the topic you are interested in. They may have posted useful agendas for urgently needed research (see Chapter 4).
2. Seek an early association with an NGO, community organisation or statutory body (e.g. local government department) at the same time as you begin to formulate your topic; try and solicit from them ideas about any burning ques-tions that need addressing.
3. Arrange early pilot focus group discussions (see Chapter 8) with potential partici-pants. This gives them the opportunity to raise research questions they see as relevant and gives you a chance to see whether your questions are perceived as pertinent.
4. Work together with partner organisations and participants to establish questions, research tools and methodological processes that are appropriate for the context in which you are working. Pay attention to cultural issues as well as temporal and spatial opportunities and constraints.
5. Negotiate a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with organisations and/or parti-cipants which details research priorities and desired outcomes, partiparti-cipants’ and researchers’ rights and responsibilities and which clarifies use/ownership rights over the information generated before beginning data collection.
Participation in data collection
1. Encourage participants to become actively involved in data generation, discussing and debating with each other, not simply answering questions posed by you.
2. If possible and appropriate, train some participants in facilitation and investiga-tion techniques so that they become ‘peer researchers’ able to assist you or to work independently with their contemporaries on topics that might not be so accessible to outsider researchers.
(See also Box 9.1) Participation in analysis
1. Make time to ‘interview’ diagrams and data generated by specific exercises. Both you and your participants will gain further insights if you spend time analysing and fine-tuning initial results.
2. Encourage participants to organise and categorise the information and to under-take higher order forms of analysis: e.g. encourage them to make connections between the different diagrams generated and to address unresolved or difficult issues that divide them.
3. Encourage participants to keep their own copies of the material generated (e.g.
give them access to flip charts, Polaroid photos etc.) and to think about what they themselves would like to do next with the information they have generated.
4. Where a large number of participants have been involved in the research, organise a later event at which provisional findings are presented and provide
BOX
9.2
opportunities for participants (and others) to question, challenge and add to the findings.
5. Where participants have identified other groups or individuals as a problem (particularly where these other people are not well represented in existing research), try and find out their views and incorporate them into the analysis.
(See also Box 9.1)
Participation in writing up
1. Return drafts of any information generated (diagrams, interview transcripts etc.) to participants for ‘member checking’ and further comment.
2. Include participants’ names on reports and articles (especially peer researchers) and acknowledge their contributions.
3. Organise and facilitate participatory writing workshops with participants to produce joint documents and reports (such activities may need to parallel rather than include your dissertation, which when submitted for assessment may require a signed statement that it is ‘all your own work’).
Participation in dissemination and actioning change
1. Return to partner organisations and/or participants’ ‘communities’ with results and discuss ways of disseminating them in non-academic formats.
2. Make joint presentations for the general public and/or make representations to key decision-makers.
3. With their approval, make such presentations on participants’ behalf (advocacy rather than participation).
4. Encourage participants and partner organisations who wish to write up the find-ings in other formats: e.g., a community newsletter, press releases, web pages etc.
Participation through reciprocity
1. Look for opportunities to pass on skills and training to partners and partici-pants: e.g. in computing, data collection, research design, writing for different audiences and/or presentation of results.
2. Make your skills available to them: e.g. in longer projects write regular briefings about progress, write short accessible summaries for use in publicity material, help with fund-raising activities, grant-writing applications or web-page design.
3. Offer to undertake voluntary work for your partner organisation (this of course can double as a participant observation phase of your research: see Chapter 10).
4. Offer peer researchers some formal recognition of their effort and skills acquisi-tion (especially younger people): e.g. a signed certificate or record of achievement, or provide a job reference.
5. If you are able to, provide refreshments and childcare at meetings, and pay participants’ and peer researchers’ expenses. If you promise money in any form make sure reimbursement is prompt and transparent. In larger better-resourced projects, think about covering the project-related management costs of partner organisations.
Box 9.2 continued
participants at any or every stage of your research project. These set out an approach within which you might decide to use a particular methodology (such as the one outlined in Box 9.1).
We would like to stress that even if you do not use diagramming techniques but choose instead to adopt other more conventional qualitative and even quanti-tative methods, you can still utilise many of the strategies set out in Box 9.2 – a participatory approach is not defined by particular techniques. For example, partners and peer researchers could help you design and analyse formal ques-tionnaires (see Power and Hunter, 2001) and you could involve local participants in ‘ground truthing’ highly technical GIS data (Harris et al., 1995).
Furthermore, we advise you to view Box 9.2 as an ideal ‘gold standard’ to aim towards, rather than as a checklist for things you must achieve. While adopting all the strategies would certainly enable you to move towards a very
‘deep’ form of participation that involved participants actively in all aspect of the research process (as opposed, say, to the ‘shallow’ use of diagramming just to collect data – see Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995; Hagey, 1997), only a few projects have achieved such depth in practice. Reread our case studies and you will see that we did not achieve every element of our own ‘gold standard’.
Nevertheless, this did not make our projects ‘sub-standard’ and they prove that valuable and action-orientated research can be achieved through partial participation.
So, even if you feel that you do not have the skills, resources or time to attempt some aspects of participation, much less to achieve all of them at once, do not be put off trying simply because you cannot ‘do participation deeply’.
Any single element of Box 9.2 will bring considerable benefits to your project, and some to your participants. Just remember the ‘scare quotes’ when you make claims about having ‘adopted a [partially] participatory approach’ in your project.
Explain which elements were participatory (e.g. data collection) and which were more conventional and determined by you as the researcher (e.g. research design).
Finally, do not let the idea of a ‘gold standard’ make you think that deep participation is necessarily the only ethical, useful or ‘relevant’ research paradigm (see Cooke and Kothari, 2001) or that it offers a panacea for all the ethical problems of doing research. New problems about representing the voices of ‘others’ and intervening in their lives arise in participatory projects. They tend to produce data on collective, publicly held opinions, rather than private individual beliefs and without careful facilitation can lead to some elements of a community dominating proceedings while others do not even engage (see Guijt and Shah, 1998). Meanwhile, empowerment facilitated within a partici-patory arena can be difficult to sustain in people’s everyday lives, especially once a project has ended (Kesby, 2005). With these facts in mind, we suggest you view Box 9.2 as a stimulus to your imagination and as a challenge to your thinking about ways in which participation might realistically and usefully be integrated into aspects of your own research project.
We would like to make four further comments to assist your thinking about undertaking participatory research. First, you will need to make some decisions about the scale at which you wish to operate (e.g. street, school, ‘community’,
health authority, district etc.). The nature of the topic and the suggestions of potential partners and participants will help you identify the scale at which research and action would be most effective, but as geographers you should be especially careful not to impose an inappropriate scale on the phenomena under study. When working with a small geographically concentrated community (e.g. residents of a single village or members of an organisation or community group) it may seem obvious who to work with, but there may be important causal processes that work at scales greater than the individuals within a single community. For example, an HIV awareness project might work with a single African village community, but the influence of sexual networks that extend to urban areas and even across national boundaries should not be ignored. At the very least, forces working at larger scales will need to be recognised when participants in a given community attempt to develop strategies for actioning future change.
Allied to this is a second issue related to the level at which you attempt to enter the power/decision-making structures of society: a complex question that may be fraught with contradictions. Working at a ‘grass roots’ level helps ordinary people to get their voices heard, while working with a governmental or non-governmental organisation might have a more direct input into policy-making. A big organisation, on the other hand, may pay lip-service to supporting your ‘participatory project’ but fail to heed or prioritise the views and needs of the grass roots or be prepared to make its own organisational structure more inclusive and participatory. Conversely, some policy-makers are deeply committed to participatory models of change and genuinely concerned to understand their clients’ needs and views, while many ordinary people do not want to participate ‘deeply’ and may prefer brief, researcher-led encounters (Kitchin, 2001). The nature of the organisation may also affect the types of participation and reciprocity you attempt. We cannot provide formulaic solu-tions; you will have to use your own judgement about the nature of the topic and the motivations of potential partners. Participation is a two-way street: you can play your part but rely on partners and participants to make the action elements of a project really work.
Who you work with raises a third issue related to the presence, or absence, of pre-existing structures through which to work and gain access to participants.
Statutory and non-governmental organisations (e.g. local councils and charities) as well as self-identified communities (e.g. a neighbourhood action group) are likely to have well-established structures that you can hook into and utilise.
Such structures will enable you to pre-arrange access even where your target group is large and dispersed. For example a study with children may be organ-ised through participating schools, while work with homeless people can be arranged by setting up your research materials in a drop-in lunch centre.
Be sensitive to the possibility that these venues may restrict the range of parti-cipants you can recruit. For instance, they may exclude children who do not go to school, the ‘hidden homeless’ or those in temporary accommodation.
In many cases, well established structures and pre-existing venues and points of contact will not exist, particularly when working with ‘hard to reach’/
outsider-identified ‘communities’, such as teenage drug users or homosexual
men and women, and you will have to formulate your own. You could advertise for participants via a medium that the target group has access to (a magazine or by distributing flyers), access people directly on the streets (e.g. approach wheelchair users in the city centre) and/or ‘snowball’ other participants via an initial contact. While participatory research can take place in street environ-ments if this is where people are accessible and comfortable, ‘deep participation’
may be difficult unless these locations become ‘venues’ for repeated contacts.
Alternatively, people recruited in the street or via advertisements can be invited to venues arranged by researchers (e.g. university seminar room or local com-munity centre) if they are happy to work in such environments.
In research that involves working with groups, a fourth set of issues arises.
Some believe that focus groups should be composed of strangers who will be less inhibited about giving their opinions, while others suggest that not only is it more convenient to work with ‘naturally occurring’ groups of people who know each other but that this enables researchers to triangulate informants’
responses (see Chapter 8; also Holbrook, 1996; Kong, 1998). Additionally, work with natural groups can also help facilitate action and the sustainability of a participatory project’s impacts once researchers have withdrawn from the com-munity, because participants already have a reason to continue to meet and communicate with each other. Nevertheless, it is often wise, at least initially, to break up natural groups into ‘peer groups’ upon advice from local partners about appropriate divisions (e.g. groups divided by age, gender, ethnicity, etc.).
Such groups can help to reduce individuals’ inhibitions, and enable them to share experiences and develop ideas independently of those with different or competing agendas.