PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH AND URBAN SOCIAL WORK: STRATEGIES FOR NAVIGATING THE CHALLENGES OF PARTICIPATION AND RECIPROCATION

Abstract

Social work research is witnessing a growing popularity of Participatory Action Research (PAR), yet putting PAR’s commitment to participation and reciprocation into practice is complicated and poses many challenges. In this article we propose a model that identifies nine strategies to actualize PAR’s ethical principles of participation and reciprocation throughout the different stages of a research process. For heuristic reasons, we distinguish three research stages: (1) establishing a co-generative space; (2) engaging in a collaborative inquiry and (3) promoting parallax perspectives, which arecomparable to the stages of identifying and defining, designing and collecting, and analysing and reporting in traditional social science research. For each stage, we offer three strategies to address the challenges that researchers are commonly faced with in that particular stage and we provide examples of our own attempts to put these strategies into practice. The model presented here must not be seen as a set of normative guidelines, rather we hope that it may spark critical discussions on PAR in social work and inspire new and established participatory action researchers on their journey.

Keywords

• participatory action research, social work research, research ethics, reciprocation