Community-Based Participatory Research - Science topic

All due respect to you for your excellent Scientific Research Work, very remarkable and with good scheduled.

Hi,

a sample size of 200-300 persons answering your survey seems to be ok if the city is not that big. Depending on how differentiated your analysis is intended to be (e.g. for living areas, districts and so on) you might want to have more participants.

A response rate of 5-10% is reasonable. So, you would have to contact about 3000 persons. If you want to do a online survey, this can be done by advertising on social media or by using some other way of dissemination, like e-mail lists.

If you do it by regular mail, response rate is also quite low.

If you want to do face to face, these might be less persons to be contacted, because the response rate is higher.

Best

R.

OK great. Here are two our books that have case studies on NCDs

good luck

Mohamed

It will need to be given a means to finance their adaptation and mitigation activities to meet the various initiatives focused on sustainable forest management.

Hi Nicolas, have a look at collaborative conceptual modelling by Barry and Katrina Proust. We have used it with different stakeholders trying to address adaptation to climate change and a colleague has used it to address contestation between foresters and conservationists. It works really well.

Thanks Hein for your comment.

It may be true that research money does not paid by local authority directly; however, in most cases research money comes from people tax money through government or companies's (extracted from local natural resources or local labor force). Therefore, research money is also local people's money directly and indirectly. On the other issue, research has NEVER been free from "the expectation". Most research always do have agendas/goals/exceptions, these exceptions may be directly or indirectly connected with institutional/academic/industries needs. So, research has never been truly “neutral", there are many done on this science false "neutrality" claim. False "neutrality" is also government or companies's exception.

However, my question was in different point in this post. As a researcher what are our responsibilities while we are doing research in community's natural resources, health, economy, and development? Whose observations give shape to our research questions and practices? Does the research fit with the priorities for research defined by community? Do we have the capacity to participate in our research? Does this research fit with community values? Is the researcher-community agreement fair in terms of benefit sharing, plans for conduct and dissemination, and all other elements of a rigorous community-based research agreement?

I know there are many research done in these challenges; however, the many communities are still facing many challenges from academic and non academic research, and many issues remain unsolved. Many communities are very fearful when they hear the term "research". It does not mean they do not want research, many communities have been using the term "research" from many generations; however, they have different meanings and purposes. As a western-trained researcher, are we failed to understand the community meanings of research that can be benefited for both (participants and research)?

You are welcome and all the best in your research.

Thanks all. Yes qualitative data was conducted by 13 peer researchers in semi-structured interviews and I will be facilitating the joint meaning making data analysis workshop.

The peer researchers were recruited from transgender, sex worker and youth communities and are really diverse in terms of language spoken (Indonesian, Javanese, English), religious background, education, age, gender, sexuality etc. The research is exploring sexual and reproductive health priorities and barriers using a cultural and gender approach, but the data analysis workshop will (It think) at first have to be more pragmatic and thematic focused.

I have asked all peer researchers to think about the key findings in their own transcripts and then hope we can work through this over 2 days in our data analysis workshop.

Thanks Elizabete - sorry for my crazy late reply. Hope all is well - Greg

Dear Issam Sir,

Slowly and gradually the two conflicting parties have met at common point. Frontier mentality is now changed to Sustainable mentality and it is possible to have liaison with traditional authorities to accomplish dear Dickson's objectives.

The concept of sustainable development is the concept of needs and limitations imposed by technology and society on environment’s ability to meet the present and future needs. The concept provides a frame work for the integration of the environmental policies and development strategies. The development should not endanger the natural systems that support life on earth.

Many industries today operate with “frontier mentality” This kind of mentality is also called as “human-centered” view. The philosophy of such people is founded on wrong assumptions as under:

With this mentality of negative attitude towards the environment the advancement in Science and technology increased the human ability to use the earth’s resources and continuously increased the damage.

Since last two to three decades there is environmental awareness. People know that we belong to the ‘world of finite nature of resources’. The constant exploitation of the nature for material consumption can only bring danger leading to climate change and extinct of human life on the earth.

Hence the concept of sustainable development leads us to new resource consumption strategies. The people with the sustainable attitude towards nature want balance between ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’. They rely upon the basic ideas that

The philosophy of sustainable development aims at meeting the basic needs of all downtrodden and deprived people in this world, the opportunities to satisfy their desires and needs for “the good life”. This can overcome the problems of poverty and lead to conservative approach. Further it is a fact that the people in the world are living longer and the global population is on the constant rise.

With the green buildings and smart cities concept , I am confident that all traditional authorities will start using eco-friendly material because environmental resources are common.

Thanks Sabina! 

I do think of these as two separate approaches to analysis, where Braun & Clarke's (2006) version of thematic analysis is much more widely used. Indeed, I would say that Rtichie & Lewis' framework analysis never really caught on outside of Britain. But since you are in Britain, you might well have advisors who could guide you in that approach.

Thank you Michael, that is just what I was looking for. :)

Though there are several methods, depending on the sample size you are assessing, in my perspective face to face interviews/questionnaires are generally feasible to get relevant data, using both focus groups or relevant parts oat the planning level.

Hi Samah,

It happened again. I am not able to download the documents. Please, would you be able to send them to my university email?

I do really apologize to bother you again

Regards

Mercedes

Many thanks, everyone. It's been helpful. God bless you

Thank you Chris and Kate for your help. You're right, I needed to be more explicit on what criteria the indicators needed to meet. I had a spreadsheet from each case study which showed the criteria each indicator met but I need to map that more clearly in NVivo through my coding structure. 

I struggled to find articles that showed empirically grounded qualitative resilience indicators that showed that link between mapping the framework onto the analysis.

Thank you both again,

Kate

 Thanks all for your contribution regarding my question.

I agree with Raoul [An important finding is that practices largely vary, that empowerment as often works as it fails, and that all depends on context. Don't think too easy about it]

. As I alsobelieve  gathering community as a group is a not easy work since project planners have to face many practical challenges in the ground. On the other hand challenges also will be different place to place. For an example caste issue will be a one of the great challenges in the Asian context which is not common to the other contexts. 

But theoretically (as I understood) community empowerment is one of the major objectives of bottom up development projects and the idea of power is at the core of empowerment. The theory of community empowerment is about ‘giving social and political power to marginalized people to obtain more control over their lives’.

This power can be developed either by particular social groups or by taking help from others. The notion of ‘social empowerment’ can be well used by project planners to prepare a particular social structure before applying a bottom up development approach. especially as Frances Moore Lappé  has highlighted  the concept of ‘political empowerment’ is another aspect of community empowerment and it is an essential and important part in any bottom-up and community based development . What do you think about those ideas?  

Dear Marcel,

Yes, exactly this is what I was looking for! Thank you so much!

Best wishes and good luck in your research!

Knowledge is never neutral. An individual's location within the social structure conditions his/her access to knowledge. This implies that there is a knowledge hierarchy and what you are told is what they want you to know. The custodians of local knowledge can grant access and therefore consent only if they want.

Dear David, these might be helpful too:

Minkler, M., Vasquez, V. B., Tajik, M. & Petersen, D. (2008). Promoting environmental justice through community-based participatory research: the role of community and partnership capacity. Health education & behaviour, 35(1), 119-137. 10.1177/1090198106287692.

Cargo, M. & Mercer, S. L. (2008). The value and challenges of participatory research: strengthening its practice. Annual review of public health, 29, 325-350.

Best of luck!

Listening is the most important thing outsiders can do. Then, ask clarifying questions-- people on the ground know a great deal.   

Respected researchers

Thank you for the reply from bottom of my heart

We analyzed the participation by the level of participation in decision-making process, focused on users of social organizations.

If your are interested in this particular work, don´t hesitate...

Thank you!

Experiments - I'm not sure - but in Australia both these groups are certainly well set up to detect changes... http://reeflifesurvey.com/ and http://www.redmap.org.au/

One of the programmes that showed lot of improvement of children behaviors and also in understanding the underlying causes of what constitutes bullying in schools was the conflict resolution programmes which was conducted in schools in Durban Surrounding Primary Schools in South Africa, and it is still practiced. The facilitators of the small groups of about 7 learners per group made it more effective as learners were able to trust each other and engage in a group easily to discus some of the serious issues they face and how the perceive and end up in such behaviors, either as victims or perpetrators. Please find the attach manual that can guide such practices for school setting. 

This article

1.Innovation in supervision and support of community health workers for better newborn survival in southern Tanzania.

and this 

2.Effect of home-based counselling on newborn care practices in southern Tanzania one year after implementation: a cluster-randomised controlled trial.

could help you practical examples of what works in an african setting, i have been in the center of this for the past 6 years...should you have any thing that need more light,pls dont hesitate to ask

So far I am unaware if there is a validated model. But I suggest that questions why?  How? and what?  Assigned a relative weight in terms of the objectives of the research in order to provide an analysis of validity

Hello Rachel

Thanks so much for your reflections.  My research blog is still open.  Would you be interested in contributing these reflections to that blog - a cut and past job would be fine if you are happy to do this?    The blog is at www.cbprethics.wordpress.com

You raise an interesting question about the distinctions between the co-researchers and the community ..... I wonder then if the researcher is the other part of that co in the co-researching equation and how could that be accommodated?  

I am very interested to read your article when it is published.  Thanks again.

Elena

Hei!

This recently published paper by Ross & Berkes might be helpful:

Ross, H., & Berkes, F. Research Approaches for Understanding, Enhancing, and Monitoring Community Resilience. Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal, advance online publication. doi: 10.1080/08941920.2014.905668

I'm assuming that by low-income you are referring to not necessarily having the resources to buy expensive mapping software. With that in mind, there is Epi Map - free from the CDC (http://wwwn.cdc.gov/epiinfo/), which is part of their Epi Info suite. And ArcGIS (from ESRI; http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer) has a free version with limited capabilities, but fine for relatively simple mapping/analysis. I haven't used it, but there is also a free, open-source GIS software called GRASS GIS (http://grass.osgeo.org/). I don't do much GIS work so that's all I'm familiar with at the moment. Good luck!

"To boldly go where no man has gone before"-- "Star Trek" (A good editor would grimace at the split infinitive.)

I am a research "trekkie." My "action research" leads me into distant archives rarely or never explored even by the native scholars. I love to surprise my scholarly readers by unusual archival finds. Although I am formally trained only in literature, my finds span many different fields: literature, music, philosophy, theology, history, and medical anthropology. I´ve always been encouraged to do this kind of wide-ranging research, and so I performed it and hopefully will continue as long as my health persists.

Yes, the existing ethics review processes seem to be viewed by many researchers, to be less than ideal for assessing the ethical rigour of CBPR. Certainly an appropriate ethical framework that responds to the complexities of CBPR could help but I wonder how that framework might look?

The study I am conducting on the topic of ethical implications of CBPR can be found at :-

where you are very welcome to join the study and share your comments.

I don't know of any frameworks for assessment of cultural dimension (what ISN'T a cultural dimension?), as such, but would propose that frameworks for *engagement* would be more important. Lots of work from the Arctic along these lines (see Fikret Berkes and many others). I suspect that for many, the "participatory" label implies, rightly or wrongly, that cultural dimensions will be threaded throughout the activity.

Hi

Catherine Moon has worked in this area. Check out the following:

Moon, C., & Shuman, V. (2013). The community art studio: Creating a space of solidarity and inclusion. In P. Howie, S. Prasad, & J. Kristel (Eds.), Using art therapy with diverse populations: Crossing cultures and abilities (pp. 297-307). London, England: Jessica Kingsley.

Kind regards

Susan

David, consider the "intervention" from a foreign agent and the "collective impact" on U.S. society by the bombings of 9-11. What a laboratory test-case!

Managing boundaries and I wrote a blog on AEA about it: http://aea365.org/blog/dawn-henderson-on-managing-boundaries/

Could be related, have a read of that, if you can't get access, there should be a copy linked only profile. :)

Andy Crabtree, Alan Chamberlain, Mark Davies, Kevin Glover, Stuart Reeves, Tom Rodden, Peter Tolmie and Matt Jones (2013) “Doing Innovation in the Wild”, CHItaly 2013, Trento, Italy

Action research requires the researcher(s) to use the results of the research to act upon and change the situation being studied. The action intervention may be part of the research design.

Participatory action research requires the people who are the subject of the study both to take part in making the analysis and then to use the findings to (a) understand and interpret the situation (b) make decisions and (c) act upon and change the situation they have analyzed.

Hi Onildo,

I see several possibilities to recruit local people in species monitoring. The most basic one is simply to collect casual observations. You can do many valuable things with this type of data and it's easy for people to join. However, an approach that collects information on observer effort and zero-observations has much more potential and power. You could do this in various ways, like for example:

1) Follow one or very few target species like a rare raptor

2) Follow a group of species like parrots

3) Follow all species

A survey method that is very successful in many countries are point counts. These could be extended with line transects or polygon surveys. In surveys that follow only one species is it advisable not only to record the presence of the species, but also information on reproduction.

Observations and surveys could be entered in web-based systems like ebird.org (only for birds) or observado.org (all species groups).

Cheers,

Henk

In a recent article in Psychiatric Times (Psychiatric Times. Vol. 30 No. 5 ) the authors Patricia Watson and Yuval Neria discuss the determinants and resilience factors post trauma. This article contains much useful information on the use of active problem solving approaches and the need for practicing a variety of coping strategies. In a group situation I would concentrate on discussing what strategies the participants have found useful in building their resilience.

@ Mpefe Ketlhapile: I am glad to hear from you that you have an agreement with the statement given by Sridhar reflecting appealing relevance to my query.

After some reading I came across the following theories by level of influence and category. Interpersonal level (Continum theory, stimulus response theory, therory of reasoned action, theroy of planned behavior, theory of freeing, health belief model, elaboration likelihood model of persuation) Interpersonal level (continum theory, social cognitive theory); Community level (communicaion theory, community organizing, community building, diffusion of innovations and community readiness model) Does any one use any of these theories as conceptual frameworks for your community research projects? What did you learn?