In from the cold? Reflections on participatory research from 1970 - 2005

Abstract

Participatory Research is a term which was first articulated in Tanzania in the early 1970s to describe a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge. Taken together these approaches combine social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process. The International Council for Adult Education provided a home in 1976 for what became the International Participatory Research Network, the means by which the ideas and practices of participatory research became more widely visible. Participatory research was a concept which, unlike most contemporary research paradigms, originated in the majority world. It originated in the rapidly expanding networks of non-governmental organisations in the 1980s and 90s. It has been the research approach of choice in many of the social movement interventions of the past 20 years. Participatory research and its sister concept participatory action research have in the past 15 years been taken up in many universities around the world both as a teaching subject and as a research method for graduate studies. One might say that, participatory research has come “in from the cold”, that it has come in from the margins to become an accepted member of the academic family.