The Merits and Pitfalls of Participatory Action Research: Navigating Tokenism and Inclusion with Lived Experience Members
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the merits and pitfalls of involving people with lived and living experiences of a phenomenon of interest (e.g., poverty, hunger, housing deprivation) in Participatory Action Research (PAR). As researchers who have conducted PAR and community-based research for several years, the authors have gained deep insight into the value of having lived/living experience members in PAR projects, as well as the challenges attendant to such work. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology, this paper provides an overview of PAR, including its purposes and objectives. Aiming to move past tokenistic inclusion, issues associated with meaningful participation, including relational (e.g., issues of power), ethical (e.g., risks of participation), emotional (e.g., research triggers), economic (e.g., remunerating contributions and financially supporting participation), representational (e.g., whose perspectives are advanced), and structural barriers (e.g., time, technological connectivity, etc.) are discussed using concrete examples. Bringing together people who may hold disparate perspectives, community ties, worldviews, and visions associated with a research undertaking can create challenges, but not including those who experience the phenomenon of study can create even more challenges.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it