Centering Community Voices through Liberatory Participatory Action Research

Background/Purpose. This paper discusses one research team’s efforts to return to the liberatory and community empowerment origins of Participatory Action Research (PAR) in order to honor community knowledge and agency in guiding research methods and research outcomes. We outline how the reflexive and transparent community-centered approaches that guided study decision-making reflect these liberatory practices (Goings et al., 2023; Grant & DaViera, 2023). The methodological decisions made over the course of this PAR study demonstrate an effort to shift away from traditional academic approaches that situate community members as objects of study, instead amplifying community voices and their research needs.

Methods. Our paper examines the intentional decision-making within a PAR project involving an interdisciplinary academic team, 4 community-based organizations, and 8 community co-researchers. The co-researchers were essential to this study that sought to better understand community members’ experiences with civic engagement after a natural disaster. Using qualitative methods, co-researchers conducted 14 individual key informant interviews and 26 focus groups within four communities, with a total of 190 participants. Co-researchers also guided instrument design, recruitment, and data analysis, disseminated data to their communities, and identified actionable next steps based on study findings.

Results. Through methodological decisions, processes and approaches to reflexivity rooted in liberatory practices, the research team intentionally sought to foster community-guided decision-making at each study stage. This includes developing and implementing an IRB approved, community-tailored collective human subjects ethics training designed specifically for the study and the situations the co-researchers might experience. Co-researcher decision-making guided the study’s approaches to linguistically and culturally-inclusive recruitment, consent, and data collection. Through reflexive discussions among community co-researchers and university researchers, community input informed coding approaches, codebook development, thematic interpretations, and recommendation development. With university team support, co-researchers guided and implemented community-informed dissemination activities focused on community information sharing and discussions. In several study communities, these dissemination activities led to direct implementation of co-researcher-guided recommendations.

Conclusions/Implications. Acknowledging the core principles that have led to some of our more innovative research methodologies can help illuminate paths forward to transformative change in both social work research and in the resultant impacts. Through a PAR approach informed by liberatory practices, we sought to center experiential knowledge and honor the agency of communities whose voices are often excluded in traditional research. Through reflexivity and transparency, we present challenges, successes, and moments of learning from this approach to help other social work researchers consider ways to implement collaborative approaches to study design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. Such approaches can foster immediate, meaningful impacts within communities and inform more long-term systemic responses.