Participatory Research

One of the most common forms for community science to take is one in which communities help design and implement research to advance understanding on a particular topic of importance for the community. This work very often appears under the term “community-based participatory research,” although many community-based participatory research projects can also fall under the Civic Engagement and Policy Making approach. Community-based participatory research also overlaps with the larger umbrellas of “action research” and “participatory research.”

In this category, we describe community science in which the primary, immediate purpose is to produce better research on a particular topic for particular communities, and in which communities shape the research questions, data collection, analyses methods, and dissemination of results^{1, 2, 3}.

In community participatory research, the community is the primary unit of research and participation^{4, 5}. “Individuals belong to larger, socially contrasted identities that shape strengths, challenges, and disparities”⁶ that therefore need to be built into research to create a complete and valid picture of an issue affecting a community. Communities are involved from the beginning in co-designing the research questions, design, and implementation^{7, 8}. Community members, researchers, and all other participants “decide together what their focus will be, how to formulate their research questions, what might be the most appropriate design, and what forms of impact they want to realize”⁹. They also collectively decide how to capture and share those results and impacts. This differs from community consultation approaches, which primarily ask communities to just test or provide feedback on a research approach.

Much of the work in community participatory research focuses on health and environmental issues^{10, 11}. This focus perhaps reflects how, for issues in these areas, it was clear much earlier to researchers within academia and institutions that it was necessary to deeply engage with communities to truly understand and make progress on issues often so personal and context-specific. It also likely reflects how health and environmental issues interact with larger economic and social justice issues and are where societal disparities and injustices are often so apparent and harmful in the forms of pollution and poor health outcomes^{12, 13}. Because of this health focus, “community” can often refer to a community defined by their shared experience with a particular disease, for example¹⁴, rather than a geographically defined community.

But community participatory approaches to community science to advance research can apply beyond health and environmental issues to science and technology-related community issues more broadly. For example, community based participatory research can help co-develop better approaches to education that is grounded in community experience¹⁵.