Participatory research

Participatory research is not itself a single method — it is the broader family of research traditions built around one condition: people affected by the research hold real authority over how it is carried out, not just a role as its subject. Cornwall and Jewkes’s influential 1995 analysis frames the distinction this way: what separates participatory from conventional research methodologies is the location of power in the research process, not the specific techniques used — the same interview, survey, or focus-group method can be run participatively or conventionally depending on who controls the framing, analysis, and dissemination decisions.

The traditions within participatory research

CASRAI’s Dictionary already documents several of the specific traditions that sit inside this broader family, each with its own history, literature, and typical setting:

• Action research — Kurt Lewin’s 1940s cyclical practice-improvement tradition, widely used in education and organisational development; participatory action research (PAR) is its power-sharing-emphasising branch.
• Community-based participatory research (CBPR) — the tradition most strongly developed in US public-health research, formalised by Israel, Schulz, Parker and Becker’s nine principles (1998).
• Co-design — focused specifically on the design phase, rooted in Scandinavian participatory-design and service-design traditions.
• Co-production — power-sharing extended across the full research lifecycle, from priority-setting through dissemination, per NIHR co-production guidance.

These traditions overlap and are frequently combined within a single project — a CBPR partnership might use co-design workshops to develop a specific intervention, for instance — they are not mutually exclusive categories, and a project rarely fits neatly into only one.

Participatory research vs. consultation and engagement

Two adjacent CASRAI Dictionary terms use “participation” in a way that can read as contradictory to the participatory-research literature, and it is worth flagging directly rather than leaving readers to reconcile it themselves. Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), as defined by NIHR/INVOLVE, explicitly distinguishes “involvement” (active partnership) from “participation” (taking part as a research subject) — in PPI’s specific vocabulary, participation is the passive role. In the broader participatory-research tradition described on this page, “participatory” means the opposite: active, power-sharing partnership. When citing either term, be explicit about which vocabulary is in use. Public engagement is broader still, spanning one-way dissemination through dialogue to active participation — participatory research corresponds only to the active-partnership end of that spectrum, not the whole of it. A survey, consultation exercise, or focus group that gathers input from affected people without giving them authority over study design, analysis, or dissemination sits outside participatory research on this test, however collaborative it may feel to run.

Data governance, attribution, and the CRediT crosswalk

Because participatory research gives affected communities or patient partners real authority over the research process, it routinely raises questions CASRAI’s own infrastructure is built to help answer: who controls the data collected, who is credited as a contributor, and under what terms findings are shared back. Where participatory research is conducted with Indigenous communities specifically, data governance is typically negotiated under frameworks like OCAP or the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — see community-controlled research for the strongest-authority end of that spectrum, where the community rather than the external researcher holds final decision rights over data and findings. On attribution, community or patient partners whose contribution meets authorship or citable-contribution criteria should be credited accordingly — see CASRAI’s guide on CRediT for non-traditional contributors and the patient-partner contribution term for how the CRediT taxonomy and the GRIPP2 reporting checklist apply to this kind of contribution.

References

• Cornwall A, Jewkes R. “What is participatory research?” Social Science & Medicine 1995;41(12):1667-1676.
• Israel BA et al. “Review of community-based research” Annual Review of Public Health 1998; Wallerstein N, Duran B “Community-Based Participatory Research for Health” 2018.
• Reason P, Bradbury H “Handbook of Action Research” 2008.
• NIHR “UK Standards for Public Involvement” 2019; NIHR “Guidance on co-producing a research project” 2021.