Research Methods and Design for Development

Participatory methods

Participatory RESEARCH Methods

Participatory DEVELOPMENT

?

Today…Principles of Participation

History of Participatory Methods

Common Methods and Advantages

Critiques

Alternatives and New forms of Participation

Methods: Approaches

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 donor-driven 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 :

– Qualitative– Largely visual (for illiterate communities)– Flexible and innovative– Rural (initially – now urban)– Enjoyable by all

• Basis:– 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: MappingMethod Process Issues ExploredSocial 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.

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

Discuss a topic in a group, facilitated by researcher.

Identification of community priorities, establishing questions for survey.

Common Methods: Others...

RRA and PRAAdvantages 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

• 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:

• Catalyst/facilitation?• Authority/gatekeeper? – ‘middle men’ of participation?• Preoccupation with ‘good’ ethics, not rigorous research?

• Nature of intervention still ‘Western’:• 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. SubjectionFoucauldian 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

1. Approaches (15 mins)2. Timing (10 mins)3. Mapping (20 mins)

Activities

1: Approaches Activity

• In small groups, how could each point of the research process be pushed towards increased participation?1. Devising research questions2. Research design3. Data collection4. Analysis/interpretation5. 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:• 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. Learning and teaching resources for your current degree

2. Your social network at the present time3. 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.