Research Methods and Design for Development
Participatory methods
Participatory
RESEARCH
Methods
Participatory
DEVELOPMENT
Today…
Principles of Participation
Alternatives and New forms of Participation
History of Participatory Methods
Common Methods and Advantages
Methods: Approaches
Critiques
Methods: Timing
Methods: Mapping
Final Thoughts
Participatory Research:
Starting Principles...
• Always power inequalities between ‘vulnerable’
research subjects/populations and the more powerful
‘researcher’ or ‘development expert’
• Epistemological approach: how are human beings
viewed in research:
– As objects = researched about?
– As subjects in own lives = research with?
• ‘Tyranny of the quantitative’ (Beazley and Ennew
2006) – simplifies complexity of human existence and
denies agency
• Therefore: Social science must include researched
population as participants...
Participatory Research:
Starting Principles...
• In development:
– Associated with ideological position that local
people should be involved in decisions that affect
their lives.
– Reaction to ‘top down’ development paradigms,
and development ‘reversals’ of 1970s-80s
– Associated with human rights to participate
– Concepts used by governments/experts often
different from realities/perceptions of local
communities
Participatory Research:
Starting Principles...
• Participatory approaches are heralded as:
• Involving poor excluded local communities in the research
process (and in their local development?)
• Giving voice to voiceless
• Empowering disempowered communities
• They are juxtaposed against other, more extractive, forms of
research
• Predicated upon the participatory role of stakeholders in the
research process
Development of participation
•
Participatory approaches changed and evolved over time
•
Evolution through rapid rural appraisal - which critics saw as
remaining extractive - through to participatory learning and
action approaches
•
Common emphasis on putting people at the centre of research
and of development
• To gain knowledge from the perspective of those being studied
• To encourage and empower people to be involved in the decision
making processes that affect their lives
Focus of Participation
•
Approach increasingly popular as alternative to donordriven visions
• Used by NGOs to gain understandings of local needs to base
interventions on
• Capitalised on by World Bank and other multi-lateral
institutions as way of making interventions ‘more appropriate’
• “The discourse of participatory development has come to
constitute the new orthodoxy in development circles, from
NGOs to the World Bank” (Green 2000, p67).
Historical Roots...
•
Action Research (Kurt Lewin 1946) – A social
psychologist: action and reflection overlap for best
possible outcome
•
Paulo Friere - political consciousness and
social praxis:
• Conscientization – help people understand
power and their own oppression. This
understanding leads to empowerment, which
leads to capacity to change own situation
• We all have responsibility to take action
• Participatory Action Research
Critiques of PAR
• 1970s PAR’s views of empowerment had
blind spots...
• middle-class activists ignored own power
(links to understandings of positionality)
• Closed/pre-conceived views of
oppression:
• Not coming organically from people
Chambers – RRA and PRA:
1980s-90s
• Robert Chambers and
Participatory Rural Appraisal
(PRA):
“a growing family of approaches,
methods, attitudes and
behaviours to enable and
empower people to share,
analyse and enhance their
knowledge of life and conditions,
and to plan, act, monitor,
evaluate and reflect.”
Robert Chambers (2002) Relaxed and
participatory appraisal, Brighton: IDS
What are RRA and PRA?
• Methods :
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Qualitative
Largely visual (for illiterate communities)
Flexible and innovative
Rural (initially – now urban)
Enjoyable by all
• Basis:
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–
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People are active agents
Local people capable of research, analysis, planning
Researchers respect informants voices + ideas
Researchers and informants are equal
Roles are reversed – ‘hand over the stick’
Researchers are ‘facilitators’
Common Methods: Mapping
Method
Process
Issues Explored
Social Mapping
Visual maps of houses, local
institutions, transport, etc. In
comm.
Services (health, education),
transport, important
institutions.
Resource Mapping
Visual map of where
participants go to get
important resources.
Water, wetland resources,
wood, food resources,
location of crops.
Mobility Mapping
Visual map of where
participants go over time
period.
Mobility of different
genders/age groups/social
class groups.
Body Mapping
Visual outline of body,
marking places on it in
response to questions.
Maternal health issues, sexual
abuse, corporal punishment,
health issues.
Social Network
Diagrams
Facilitator/participants
construct map of their social
network.
Street children, young people,
disadvantaged, exploring
networks.
Common Methods: Others...
Method
Process
Issues Explored
Matrix Ranking and
Scoring
Brainstorm list, then rank
them by importance and
frequency.
Disease, food consumption,
dealing with health problems.
Priorities.
Seasonal and Social
Calendars
Draw events that happen
during different seasons.
Wet, dry seasons, cycles of
migration, work patterns.
Time Transects
Individually draw how spend
time on time line or pie chart
(24 hours).
How people spend time, time
for different activities (work,
seeking services).
Causal Flow Analysis In group draw a diagram of
what causes problems in
particular situations.
Community perceptions of
causes (e.g. Disease, infant
mortality). Reasoning.
Focus Group
Discussions
Identification of community
priorities, establishing
questions for survey.
Discuss a topic in a group,
facilitated by researcher.
RRA and PRA
Advantages of PRA
Based on respect for local knowledge.
Seeks out what matters to local people.
Local people take ownership of resultant action.
Groupwork and non-literate processes: more
egalitarian. Reverses Hierarchies.
Quick, cheap, flexible. Yet: Reliable and valid.
Adaptation/innovation. Developed in-situ.
Develop capacity and skills of participants.
Experiential: theory induced from practice.
Leads to material change and economic benefits.
Voice for the marginalised. Challenge social exclusion.
Empowering to local people.
3 layers:
1. Changing mindsets and attitudes of
practitioners,
2. Empowering local communities,
3. Providing a toolkit for methods.
Participatory Rural Appraisal
= A mindset, a philosophy,
a toolkit
Critiques – 1. Costs
•
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Participation takes time. Disrupts daily lives.
Voluntary?
Lack of direct livelihood benefits.
Gender implications.
Raise expectations.
Reveal information in public – social damage.
Most marginalised = least capacity.
Critiques – 2. What does it MEAN?
• PRA and bad practice: using the label without the
content:
• Rhetoric can be employed by range of agents.
• Buzzwords: participation, empowerment,
community – multiple and competing meanings.
• Easy to adopt methods without values and
philosophy.
• PRA seen as ‘quick fix’.
• Conservative: pushes and ‘decentralises’ services
onto society.
• Suits neoliberal reform.
• Embodies Western values, ethics and morals:
• Project Western romantic notions of community
• And Western notions of empowerment/participation!
Critiques – 3a. Power,
empowerment, Community
• Communities: natural, desirable values, harmonious.
• Power relations within over-simplified.
• Rural communities may just be “geographical
juxtapositions of people with little else in common
apart from their local geography”
(Brockington and Sullivan 2003, p63).
• In reality: conflict, local power relations, and
exclusions/inclusions.
• Gender, age, ethnic, class, political differences.
• Participatory research can enhance local conflict:
– Elite capture.
– Conflict with current structures.
Critiques – 3b.
Power/empowerment...
• Naive assumptions about vulnerability of hierarchies.
•
Assumes powerful will cede power.
•
Risk of political conservatism.
•
•
Individual/community empowerment rather than social
or political entitlement (role of state?)
BUT ALSO: Prioritising local marginalises State? Increases
power of NGOs?
• Risk of reproducing existing power relations.
– Discursive and embodied articulations of power become
normative (Kothari 2001) = unchallenged.
• Who is empowered? Exactly how?
Critiques – 4. Interventions/Methods
• Insider/outsider dichotomy...
• Role of researcher:
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Catalyst/facilitation?
Authority/gatekeeper? – ‘middle men’ of participation?
Preoccupation with ‘good’ ethics, not rigorous research?
• Nature of intervention still ‘Western’:
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Idea of participation from the West.
Ideas of volunteerism, responsibility –
community rather than individual?
Embody western ways of knowing – diagrams,
group discussions, relaxed perspective.
Critiques – 5. Theoretical problems
• No ‘legitimating force’ (Kapoor 2002) or
systematic rules to govern participatory
action.
• Insufficiently theorised.
– E.g. What prevents elite capture?
• What is empowerment?
• Limits of participation?
Critiques – 6. Subjection
Foucauldian subjection
• “helps to persuade its target populations that not only are
economic and state authorities the real power, but that
they are also within everyone’s reach, provided everyone
is ready to participate fully in the development design...
To participate is… reduced to the act of partaking in the
objectives of the economy…”
(Rahnema in Development Dictionary)
•
More generally, participation is ‘the new tyranny’ (Cooke
and Kothari)
• Makes power more diffuse/pervasive.
• Participatory if researcher chooses Qs and methods, takes
data away, and writes up without informants?
Activities
Activities
1. Approaches (15 mins)
2. Timing (10 mins)
3. Mapping (20 mins)
1: Approaches Activity
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In small groups, how could each point of the
research process be pushed towards increased
participation?
1. Devising research questions
2. Research design
3. Data collection
4. Analysis/interpretation
5. Writing up/presentation
What might be the limitations or difficulties in doing
this? Could they be overcome?
2: Timing
•
Time use is often a key concern to development
researchers – the amount of time spent on different tasks,
travelling etc is often located as a concern for
interventions.
•
Can use a range of tools to explore this concern:
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Seasonal calendars
Seasonal activity, illness or other calendar
Daily activity use charts
Journey charts – of daily journeys, but also movement through a
process over time (e.g. Health journey around being counselled and
tested for HIV/AIDS, or changing behaviours over life course)
Seasonal calendar
Daily time chart
2: Timing Activity
Either:
Produce a seasonal
calendar of academic
workload, paid
employment, holidays,
etc for a 12 month
period.
Or:
Produce a daily time
chart of a typical
weekday - this can be in
a number of forms: a
clockface, allocation of
counters to different
categories of activity
etc.
3: Mapping
•
Mapping tools can be used to develop understandings of
respondents’ relationships with and understandings of spaces
across a range of scales.
•
Common uses for mapping include consideration of the
body/self, households, mobilities, networks, provision of
services, location of resources, maps of fear or stigma, etc.
•
Can be used to map service provision, social activities and
practices, mobilities and constraints. Can generate
differential understandings of space and engagements with
space in different forms by various sections of society.
3: Mapping Activity
•
In small groups, develop a map to
address one of the following themes:
1.
2.
3.
Learning and teaching resources for your
current degree
Your social network at the present time
Locations of key resources and facilities in
your daily life
Are these methods participatory?
• The tools just explored are commonly viewed as
‘participatory’ – but, in reality, are they anything more
than a way of eliciting information?
• Are they, truly, more participatory than an interview
or focus group?
• Participation is a contested term and controversial
approach.
• It has become a buzzword to hide a multitude of
challenges that are often avoided or overlooked.
• Participatory approaches are about: philosophy and
mindset, not just methods.