Posted on October 7th, 2009 by Eddie Cowling in Archived project news
Tagged as: research methods
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ShareThisThe panel session that we organised at the NCVO/VSSN conference on participatory research methods was one of the biggest panel sessions of the conference demonstrating the level of current interest in participatory research. The three speakers (Danny Burns, Sarah Johnsen and Thilo Boeck) presented, briefly but very effectively, how they had used participatory research methods in some of their research projects and reflected on their experience. What was particularly interesting was to see how different levels of participation in a project had different implications. However, all use of participatory research methods seems to question the traditional role of the researcher, and the boundaries between research and community development can become quite blurred at times.
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I went to the conference and this session was indeed one of the busiest. Danny Burns explained how he had facilitated a group of school children to find out how they could make their school greener, and how this had led to them asking the teachers whether they could have a ‘no electricity’ day. Despite some resistance at first (health and safety, etc), a no electricity day happened. His example showed how participatory research can be hugely empowering and how it can (and should?) be part of wider, whole system change – a point that Danny emphasized.
As one of the researchers in the Pathways through Participation project this struck a chord – the project is about improving our knowledge on the complex ways individuals participate. By bringing that knowledge to policy-makers and practitioners we hope that they can create opportunities for participation that better meet people’s needs and aspirations.
Something else I took from the panel session was the tricky nature of ethics and subjectivity in participatory research. Sarah Johnsen’s example of using photos in research with homeless people in an inner city area showed, again, how empowering participatory methods can be – in this case by giving someone a camera to tell their story. But this method also raised issues that needed to be worked through – the problem of anonymity and consent (had the people in the photos agreed to be photographed? Anonymity had been guaranteed but some people wanted to be identifiable) and interpretation (but what does this photo actually mean? What did the person taking the photo want to show? How might others interpret the photo?).