Issues and challenges in participatory research

This chapter draws together some of the key issues to emerge from the previous chapters regarding the advantages and challenges in PR in order to advance participatory methods and approaches. With this advancement in mind, this chapter also considers the need to posit or locate participatory methods more broadly (including PAR, PNR, and so on, with vulnerable or marginalised groups) within a defined Participatory Model (PM). Such a model is constructed and presented (see Figure 6.1) from a participant-oriented standpoint, and is intended as an aid to researchers (and others) who are planning, or reflecting on the use of, participatory methods with different participant populations, including vulnerable, marginalised or socially excluded people. The PM and associated principles presented and described below are also intended to highlight and promote issues of ‘voice’ and emancipation in qualitative research more broadly. While as Walmsley and Johnson suggest, qualitative research techniques such as case studies, interviews and stories appear to offer opportunities for ‘increasing power for participants’, they also note that ‘not all qualitative research is concerned with empowering those who take part in it’ (2003, p 32).

What is missing from research that facilitates participatory approaches are guidelines, or a frame of reference, from which researchers (and practitioners) can work in order to enhance collaboration, inclusion and emancipation in research relationships, and particularly with vulnerable or marginalised groups, as well in the processes and practice of PR itself. While the focus of this book has not been specifically on PAR, which tends to focus on large or small group dynamics (see Chevalier and Buckles, 2013, p 10; see also Chapter One) and community action and transformation, rather than marginalised or socially excluded individuals, nevertheless, some of the underlying principles of PAR are shared with PR more broadly. This is particularly the case in participatory approaches that consider and work with participants as actors in research (see Figure 6.1) – and especially in terms of ‘doing research “with people”, in lieu of doing it “on them”’ (Chevalier and Buckles, 2013, p 10).

Any proposed participatory framework or model will require commitment from researchers to recognise and adhere to a number of principles and objectives when conducting the kinds of research that make participatory claims, rather than working within a strict set of rules.