Participatory research: What is the history? Has the purpose changed?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For this article, I have chosen to follow others and to use the term participatory research (PR) ‘as an umbrella term for a school of approaches that share a core philosophy of inclusivity and of recognizing the value of engaging in the research process (rather than including only as subjects of the research) those who are intended to be the beneficiaries, users, and stakeholders of the research. Among the approaches included within this rubric are community-based participatory research, participatory rural appraisal, empowerment evaluation, participatory action research, community-partnered participatory research, cooperative inquiry, dialectical inquiry, appreciative inquiry, decolonizing methodologies, participatory or democratic evaluation, social reconnaissance, emancipatory research, and forms of action research embracing a participatory philosophy’ (1). PR finds its origins in both social action research and emancipatory philosophy; frequently described as emerging from ‘northern’ and ‘southern traditions’. In the ‘northern tradition’, Kurt Lewin in the 1940s working in both the USA and the UK, proposed a cycle of continuous inquiry, action and evaluation, undertaken with or by—as opposed to on or for—society’s marginalized peoples. Lewin’s action research promoted empowerment and social equity: it ‘needs the best of what the best among us can give and the help of everybody’ (2). This was followed by Argyris (3) and others who expanded these early concepts and applied them to promote organizational efficiency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | medium |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Methods · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.377 | 0.325 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.106 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.034 | 0.058 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".