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Record W4407911981 · doi:10.1080/19325037.2025.2466963

Participatory Theory Building: A Methodological Review and Conceptualization

2025· review· en· W4407911981 on OpenAlexafffund
John C. Hayvon

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Journal of Health Education · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicParticipatory Visual Research Methods
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsConceptualizationSociologyCitizen journalismParticipatory action researchPsychologyQualitative researchPedagogyEngineering ethicsEpistemologySocial sciencePolitical scienceComputer scienceEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background Historically, community members are not positioned as theory-builders in academia. With growing evidence on the utility of participatory- and inclusive-research methodologies, this study posits that participatory theory building, which promotes the perspectives, voices, and lived experiences of community members, can contribute to the reduction of inequalities.Purpose To assess the evidence base of existing peer-reviewed studies which involve participatory methodologies for academic theory-building, and, identifying potential best-practices.Methods A search for articles in the English language, framed in “participatory action research” and “grounded theory,” was conducted on PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. Articles retrieved were categorized into research studies (n = 12) and review papers (n = 2).Results Existing peer-reviewed studies use both participatory action research and grounded theory as a foundation to explore participatory theory building. The degree of participation and theory building, however, varied widely across studies. Recurring methodological considerations are collated into tables.Discussion Participatory theory building presents value toward refining existing theories, fostering more community-engagement, and can lead to outputs that guide future research efforts.Translation to Health Education Practice As the evidence base suggests value in participatory theory building, key methodological considerations drawn from existing studies – ranging from sampling and recruitment to post-project evaluation – may inform future research.A AJHE Self-Study quiz is online for this article via the SHAPE America Online Institute (SAOI) http://portal.shapeamerica.org/trn-Webinars

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

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 armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaMetaresearch
Domain: Methods · Genre: Review
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Not applicablelow
gptno category
Domain: not available · Genre: Review
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Other designlow
models splitAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.044
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.030
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.968
Threshold uncertainty score0.984

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0440.030
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.861
GPT teacher head0.780
Teacher spread0.081 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Metaresearch

The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.

Study designNot applicable · Other design
DomainMethods
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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