Community-based research has emerged as a prefer- ence among qualitative researchers who engage in inquiry primarily for its usefulness to the social unit where it originates. Research practices engaged in the interests of community service are evolving and have been shaped by the contexts in which the research occurs. Community-based research methods (i.e., for data collection) have been adopted by researchers using methodologies (i.e., epistemological or theoret- ical stances) that are participatory and based in an ethics of care that guides human relationships.
Community-based research emphasizes relationality and the democratic involvement of participants in research events. Many community-based researchers equate usefulness criteria with empowerment. They seek social justice through the potential for research to strengthen communities by facilitating diverse involvement in research practices and promoting crit- ical reflection about the community by members of the community. An overriding interest is in the power of research events to provoke political action. Community- based research is a form of collective action that a community undertakes as key to its survival, its empowerment, or its continued effectiveness in encouraging social and political change.
Characteristics of Community-Based Research
Community-based research is grounded in Indigenous and ethnic community studies and in feminist episte- mologies. Various Aboriginal, Mexican American, and African American communities have also engaged in continuing efforts at decolonizing ways of knowing and
understanding the increasingly globalized world. Black community studies arose in university discourse to crit- icize domination by Western White epistemologies.
From the turn of the 20th century, this work stressed the importance of subjective interpretations of human experience, ethnic diversity in experience as the foun- dation for learning, and commitment to scholarship that linked research, pedagogical praxis, and community service. From DuBois and contemporary Black writers of his time, there emerged a commitment to research that would improve the daily lives of people of color;
the service orientation they envisioned was conceived as an opportunity for reciprocal benefit in collabora- tions between universities and society. This early vision of community-centered action by university researchers was reinvigorated during the 1960s, and again during the early 1990s, through university and community efforts to establish “Black agenda projects” in the United States. These early scholars in Black studies founded the strong tradition of action-centered, politi- cal community discourse about diversity that is central to community-based research.
Similarly, feminist epistemologies have generated community-based research practices in which a rela- tional ontology of self–other defines situated knowl- edge and partial perspectives. This is, again, overtly political research that privileges the participant’s own understanding and processes for meaning-making over those of the researcher. In serving the commu- nity, feminist researchers strive to redefine the role of the researcher from one of distant impartiality to structure research through interactions and relation- ships based in empathy, mutuality, and respect for the expert knowledge of the participant.
Ethnic and feminist epistemologies encouraged a tradition of situated research that is continued today in numerous examples of community-based research.
Community-based research is a feature, character- istic, or (alternatively) a condition on which participa- tory action research, performance ethnography, critical arts-based inquiry, and other new paradigm approaches are contingent.
These and other strands of community-based research exist simultaneously. There are, however, com- monalities in the various theories and approaches to performing research in the community. Community- based research across the disciplines addresses positional- ity, reflexivity, collaboration, voice, and praxis, and it embraces an ethics based in human caring. All community-based research is grounded in methodologies Community-Based Research———97
that challenge privileged access to truth, impartiality, and scientific objectivity. As such, it draws on the “situ- ated knowledge” of both the researcher and the researched (or research participants); that is, knowing depends on the contexts (space and time marked by bor- ders and interruptions) in which it occurs.
Positionality.Positionality is about the situatedness of knowledge. People experience the world from differ- ent embodied, social, intellectual, and spatial loca- tions. How we are situated within social spaces and locations, taken in combination with our personal and shared intellectual histories as well as our lived expe- riences, shapes each of our understandings of the world, our knowledge, and our actions. Humans per- ceive “self” and are perceived by others in relation to multiple, diverse, and dynamic social processes, includ- ing (but not limited to) gender, class, race/ethnicity, age, and sexuality. These social, geographic, and intel- lectual spaces that we hold individually and as mem- bers of multiple communities serve to position us differently in well-established hierarchies of political power and social privilege. Positionality also refers to the embodied presence of the researcher and the partic- ipants’ responses to the dynamic interplay of the presence of the researcher in their social world.
Knowledge, facts, truths, and understandings are social constructions marked by the continual processes of life as it has been lived. This concentration on positional- ity and situated ways of knowing calls for research that plays with the ephemeral, vernacular, and dynamic performances of thought and action.
Reflexivity. In the context of community-based research, reflexivity means the ongoing analysis of relationships, power dynamics, and purposes of res- earchers. Reflexive researchers acknowledge that it is never possible to fully understand oneself or one’s relationships in the community, nor is it fully possible to understand the motivations, purposes, or hegemonic indicators that pull us toward particular understand- ings, positionalities, or worldviews. Thus, the research remains open to critical evaluation and reconsideration and is, ultimately, flexible to the ongoing dynamics of individual and group development and change.
Collaboration. In community research, collaboration speaks to the involvement of a social group in the use of inquiry methodologies to promote empowerment and facilitate the emergence of the group as a political
voice. In community-based inquiry events, both the researcher and participants are collaborators in the project of doing research. Often their roles are inter- changeable, engaged as they are in a reciprocal exchange of ideas. Research design in this mode is sensitive to how values, power, and politics frame
“truths.” Interpretations of information are labeled as constructions and are noted as interpretations of the world marked by the contexts in which they are pro- duced. It is typically a collaborative communal project in which all participants, including both the researcher and the researched, acknowledge that they bring social, historical, familial, and other diverse social constructions into their research interpretations. In practice, this critical reflection about how ideas are formed and traditions are created may take the form of autobiography. Furthermore, among practitioners in the paradigm of community-based inquiry, it is widely acknowledged that research is always political, moral, and steeped in the complexities of power, privilege, oppressions, and representations.
Voice.Voice is an important consideration during data collection when the researcher has the responsibility of including members of the community who might oth- erwise be silenced or marginalized during the processes of doing research. Voice is also a considera- tion in analytic and representational processes of doing research; it is expected that the researcher will take care to interpret research data in the context of the community from which they arose (rather than back in the laboratory) and to engage multiple people with dif- fering points of view in interpreting data. Finally, it is the responsibility of the researcher to include the voices of others in the representations of research as a function of demonstrating the dynamic ephemeral qualities of research that exists as community activity.
For example, artist-researchers accomplish this by cre- ating open spaces and multiple entrances to their work;
they create new ways for people to position themselves in the world. They are the catalysts for new interpreta- tions, understandings, and forces for taking action.
Within discursive openings, various and diverse mem- bers of the community can form new collaborations that have the potential to revise the hegemonic ravishes of relationship and history.
Praxis.Praxis refers to the interplay between reflection and action that is the purpose of community-based research. In praxis-based research, the purpose is to use 98———Community-Based Research
the act of doing research as a means to revise stereo- types, habits of mind, and deeply held meanings that guide people’s thinking about social and political issues and to encourage actions that demonstrate these changes in theories or worldviews underscoring the ways in which people live in society. Community-based research involves a group of individuals in the processes of doing research for the purpose of social change that will result in social justice and democratic equity.
Ethics of
Community-Based Research
An ethics of care is built on the idea that participants in research are co-equals. As co-equals, interviews are replaced by conversations. Discourse among research collaborators is an exchange of ideas. Power dynam- ics, hierarchy, and political positions are explicated rather than ignored. Ethics sometimes clashes with reality as the balance of power shifts, as purposes for doing research diverge, and as the very personal dynamics of the collaborative research unfold with all of the tensions and rewards known to occur in human relationships. Retaining reflexivity becomes an important act in preserving the ethics of community- based research. Through ongoing discourse about relationships of individuals, the research can stay on track toward rethinking and reforming social values and practices.
Advantages and Challenges of Doing Research in the Community Probably the greatest advantage of performing com- munity-based research is the potential for the research participants to exercise control over their own lives, solve their own problems, respond to social situations in their own voices, and promote their own causes.
Among the challenges of collaboration is the possi- bility of co-opting the research event to larger commu- nity goals that do not serve social justice or equity but, instead, reinforce systemic hegemony. Who partici- pates in the collaboration depends on the context, the problem that is being researched, and the inclusiveness of the research participants. The research project may include only individuals who are affected by a particu- lar problem, or it may include representatives of social service agencies or other community actors whose role is to address social issues through systemic functions
(e.g., health care providers who work closely with a community to deliver services while also researching the impact of those services). Thus, community-based research differs greatly depending on membership, and democratic participation does not always serve social justice. For instance, if a group of people living in a shelter become activist-researchers seeking informa- tion on how to improve the system of services to unhoused individuals, their efforts could be compro- mised by an existing system of missionary care or gov- ernmental interventions that do not include long-term housing if their research collaborative includes repre- sentatives of the existing system.
Researchers need to be attentive to a balance of freedoms such that the positive liberties of one com- munity do not create a powerful hierarchy over another community of individuals. Care must be taken to notice whose interests were not represented in the research. Similarly, researchers need to be caring about the human tendency to know “what’s best” for others—
based on their own worldviews and experiences—such that community-based research can become colonizing in the same ways as can expert-directed research; the experts are just differently named and larger in number as constituents of a community. Involving all stake- holders in a research project is more easily said than done. Rifts can occur between members of communi- ties and the holders of resources (e.g., university researchers) and can create unintended new power hierarchies. Inclusion carries its own difficulties in that open dialogue can be thwarted in situations where trust is in question. It is always difficult to attend to ques- tions such as “whose truth” is being represented in research, especially when it is a given that different truths exist simultaneously.
Susan Finley
See alsoCritical Arts-Based Inquiry; Participatory Action Research (PAR); Performance Ethnography
Further Readings
DuBois, W. E. B. (1973).The education of Black people: Ten critiques 1906–1960.New York: Monthly Review Press.
Jennings, J. (1993).Theory, praxis, and community service.
Occasional Paper No. 23, William Monroe Trotter Institute, University of Massachusetts.
Katz, M. S., Noddings, N., & Strike, K. A. (Eds.). (1999).
Justice and caring: The search for common ground in education.New York: Teachers College Press.
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Lincoln, Y. S. (1995). Emerging criteria for quality in qualitative and interpretive research.Qualitative Inquiry, 1,275–289.
Noddings, N. (2003).Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education(2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.