Resident Experts: The Potential of Critical Participatory Action Research to Inform Public Housing Research and Practice

Background and Purpose: Public policies affecting those in poverty are often created without direct, meaningful participation from the people they are meant to serve. This has been especially the case with public housing. While the lack of participation in policymaking has been heavily criticized by researchers, research practice overwhelmingly perpetuates this expert-driven model. Despite the growing number of studies investigating public housing redevelopments – 48 since 2000 – none of these purported to use participatory approaches. There is a critical need for approaches to research and policy that engage public housing residents as agents of change. To contextualize the need for alternative research methods in public housing, we explore social science research through the lens of Young’s (1990) five faces of oppression, then frame the current direction of public housing policy and the need for research. We present the principles of CPAR as an alternative model for research and policy-making, and provide a case study of a CPAR project sited in a Nashville, TN public housing project slated for demolition and redevelopment.

Methods: This exploratory study draws data from a larger longitudinal ethnographic study that began in September 2013, and is ongoing as of April, 2015, exploring the work of Cayce United, a resident community organizing project. This case study focuses on The Working Neighborhoods Assessment, a Critical PAR project undertaken by members of Cayce United working in collaboration with academic partners to document workforce capacity within the Cayce community. Data includes field notes from more than 750 hours of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with Cayce United leaders and other residents, as well as video and audio recordings taken at team meetings. Also included are artifacts related to the research process, including organizational documents, survey data collected by the research team (n: 82), and secondary analysis of a comprehensive resident survey (n: 554) conducted by the MDHA in the summer of 2013.

Results: The Working Neighborhood Assessment offers an important contrast to previous research in public housing redevelopments. Centering resident experts in the research process heightened the validity and credibility of the research findings: the Working Neighborhood Assessment identified gaps in previous research about their neighborhood; redefined the scope of who counts as their community; asked questions that had yet to be asked about the problems they face; gathered and analyzed data that can inform the redevelopment process before it is underway; interpreted findings in new ways; and generated specific, actionable recommendations that are being used today by organizers to advocate for residents.

Conclusions: Critical PAR approaches cannot answer all the questions that remain regarding how to improving outcomes for people in poverty, but they most certainly can augment and extend other research, and help public housing policy and social science research fulfil its liberatory potential. We conclude that centering resident experts in the research process heightened the validity and credibility of the research findings, amplified residents’ self-determination, and provided greater congruence between academic researchers’ social justice values and our research methods.