Talk:Participatory action research/Archive 1

Intro paragraph
Can the lead paragraph be brought down to size? Perhaps create an "About" section after the lead, and stick the brunt of the info from the current lead there? See Lead section for more. - Freechild 15:45, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The lede definitely needs some work. Right now it doesn't meet the basic formatting rules specified in WP:LEDE.  Iknowyourider (t c) 19:54, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Now it's very short but after reading it I have no idea what PAR is. Not good. 85.76.80.10 (talk) 20:33, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

effects of the researcher's direct actions of practice--do you mean ON 64.91.54.173 (talk) 21:35, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Merger talk
I switched the direction of the possible merge. As someone who hass practiced Participatory action research for years, let me tell you that no one publishes or even talks about cooperative inquiry. PAR is the correct title for this type of research.

There's a much more developed article under Participatory Action Research (upper case A, upper case R). I'm not sure how to merge them.... Anyone?

Oh, I think I got it. Oev21 00:45, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

HI I just wanted to let you know that the link on the page on Participatory action research PRA to Robert Chambers is not the Robert Chambers that is mentioned. The Robert Chambers mention on the PAR site is not dead and is a completely different person as he was not dead in 1983 and the other died in 1871, Please someone get it right. cheers Richard

Particpatory Action Research [from the perspective of one; I hope] appears to me to move beyond the cooperative and into the dailectic of a leader. In PAR someone or some group had to have had the idea to start the process. You offer something. The justifying strategies and methodologies to engage the community to whom the action is addressed, all seem well-intentioned and necessary; though, as always, the final sense of complete justification is rarely achieved - otherwise, how was it action. Thank you. Michael Ryan, Ottawa

Cooperative inquiry merge
Merge. Seems to be enough overlap and the Cooperative inquiry article could always be recreated with more information and source material. --Ronz 20:13, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Do not merge. There is a concrete body of academic research and social practice that clearly designates the unique identity and relevance of participatory action research. That body of research and social practice is not directly related to any evidence supporting cooperative inquiry. The differentiation of the two is made by established established precident and should not be decided within the Wikipedia community.

Do NOT merge; keep a unique section. I have studied Cooperative Inquiry and PAR on the masters and doctoral level and they are not the same. Two criteria come to mind:

1. PAR uses critical theory as its root and this is a less inclusive research paradigm than the unique paradigm proposed by Heron as the participatory inquiry paradigm. The Participatory Research Paradigm Heron writes of is inclusive of critical theory and more: Heron and Reason use an "umbrella" for all of the positivist and post positivist paradigms as per Denizen, Lincoln, Guba, Heron and Reason in various publications. PAR came earlier and while I need to review the work of Chambers, PAR was and I believe is, based on critical theory primarily.

2. In it's purest use CI (Cooperative Inquiry) is a spiritual inquiry. While CI has political, psychological and philosophical intentions (if I am rembering them correctly) and it is similar to PAR in what most basically to shift power relations, the main power is to inquiry together into the sacredness of existence.

CI isn't used much in its purest form in education especially in the US. I believe making this value of spiritual inquiry a clear intent would need to be done very carefully (sensitively goes without saying) given the controversies surrounding religion and the challenging of patriarchy which Heron's work intends.

Do NOT merge CI with PAR.

Thanks, Npeden in Monterey, CA

Don't do it! Co-Op Inq is at best a specific application of PAR, but within the interested psychological research community they are definitely considered to be separate methodologies. Link by all means - but don't merge.

Action Research merger OR rephrase introduction
Right now the lead says "Participatory Reseach - or Action Research - is a...". If these words are interchangeable, why do we have two articles?

If they are not the same, perhaps we could even have a paragraph on the differences between them? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Swooch (talk • contribs) 13:05, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I just came here to ask this same question. It seems that the issue is unresolved. I am not sure what to do just now.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   22:50, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Page rewritten
I just uploaded a more extensive description and coverage of PAR, the different fields where it has been used over the years (including the contributions of French psychosociology), and a longer list of leading authors, key publications and related Wiki and Internet sites. I also checked all links (wikipedia, external, book ISBN, etc.).

The revised article makes a clearer distinction between PAR and closely related approaches. PAR and Action Learning (done without formal research or participation) or Collaborative Inquiry (done without formal research or action) overlap but are not the same, for instance. The article focuses on contributions that clearly attempt to bring all three components together: Participation + Action + Research.

I deleted derogatory statements about some contributions to PAR. Also, given that the theoretical affiliations of PAR authors vary considerably (pluralism prevails in this regard), I took out claims about "principal" sources of theoretical inspirations. Still, a brief synthesis of major theoretical affiliations (humanism, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, feminism and critical sociology, for instance) would be helpful.

Last but not least, I invited many key PAR authors and practitioners to further improve this page in months to come, in the hope of turning this into a reviewed featured article.

Jchevali3244 (talk) 14:58, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Wow! You guys have changed the article a lot. I'm not an expert on the subject but it looks like a big improvement to me.
 * I think the thing which needs to be added now to the article is more on what PAR actually is. Ideally, this will start with a definitive statement at the start of the lead section that summarises what PAR is in one or two sentences.  Something like "Participatory action research (PAR) is a diverse set of methods for conducting research with participation of communities."
 * Then the rest of the article needs more description of the actual methods. The article as it stands doesn't really tell us much about what the methods are, it just says where they came from, who contributed to their development, that sort of thing.  For example in the old version of the article is said "Action research involves utilizing a systematic cyclical method of planning, taking action, observing, evaluating (including self-evaluation) and critical reflection prior to planning the next cycle." I can't see any statements like this in the new version of the article.  I would be really interested to know if this cycle is basically the same in all instances of PAR, or are there big differences?
 * Yaris678 (talk) 22:43, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Yaris is right. I'm confused as to what this thing actually is. Bazonka (talk) 15:10, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * OK. I have had a go at rewriting the first paragraph. I think that makes it clearer what PAR is, although I'm sure it could be improved further.
 * Anyone got any further thoughts on this? I am considering doing something similar to other bits of the article.
 * Yaris678 (talk) 09:54, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

This article is beyond help!
I'm sorry to write this, but where does one start to improve an article such as this? It's a nightmare- I for one do not fancy adding inline citations to this- Christmas is only 6 weeks away! Not wanting to be unplesant, but how did it get here? Richard Nowell (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
 * An easy start is deleting content which has no citation at all. No one is obligated to add inline citations, even though it is problematic for them to remain long-term. If you have content to share then you can add that properly as you like. If you wish to remove content with a citation then you can WP:BB and do that also, but please note why you do this on the talk page.
 * This page came to be this way because it was made by a new editor who created this article then left Wikipedia after three months, and now almost two years has passed. Most Wikipedia content is contributed by users who are not here regularly and do not know site formatting rules. Often they leave before someone teaches them, and I think that happened in this case. The article remains because we presume that the content looks good enough to not be deleted outright and leave nothing for people to find. You could propose to delete it all, if you had a reason and wished to do so.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  19:01, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
 * So is it worth trying to improve it, or should I go and do something else? Obviously there is lots of content and references but homogenising the two is a major task. Richard Nowell (talk) 19:10, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I cannot say whether you would find value in improving this article. Speaking for myself, I like to spend my time doing things that will have the most impact for the most Wikipedia readers, so I make decisions about my time by looking at the audience traffic to Wikipedia articles. Here is the traffic report for this article, which says it gets about 6000 visits per month. Most Wikipedia articles get fewer than 5000 pageviews per month, so this article is getting above-average traffic. A fairly popular Wikipedia article will get 20,000 views per month, so among popular Wikipedia articles this one is less popular. Personally, I would rather spend time developing a more popular article so that my time can benefit more people. I make exceptions when there is some topic close to my interests, in which case I would develop a less popular article.
 * I cannot say how you should spend your time, but perhaps you also would be gratified to check pageviews by clicking the "history" tab then "page view statistics" on articles that you like.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  19:24, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Let's improve the references
Anyone got any ideas about the best way to improve the references in this article? There are plenty of them, they are just not in a style you would expect on Wikipedia. I guess there are two sub-questions:


 * What do we want the references to look like? e.g. Do we want separate "Notes" and "References" sections like the article on Paul Tibbets?


 * What is the best way to get this? e.g. Is there some kind of script that can help? Or is it best to edit it manually?

(I am pinging  and  cos they know stuff.)

Yaris678 (talk) 12:14, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd recommend reformatting all of the refs at the bottom to use the cite journal template and with around them, put them in, and then run through the text to replace the current text refs with  's. Search/replace in a text editor might help speed things up. I'd keep them all in the same section, as I think that's the most user-friendly way to do it (you don't have to click twice on the reference tag and then the reference link to see the reference info). I'd be happy to help if you want to take this approach, although I know other people prefer other (often more complicated) approaches! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:19, 23 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Ooof. I've basically spent the whole weekend on it... and [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Participatory_action_research&type=revision&diff=664946888&oldid=663531305 manually wikified the references.] I haven't put them all in template format, but that would be at least another weekend gone. If anyone has a clever way of doing that quicker, that would be great.
 * BTW, viewing that diff is probably best done with WikEdDiff or similar, cos the standard diff gets confused part way through the references section.
 * Yaris678 (talk) 01:07, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Nice work, well done! Mike Peel (talk) 07:19, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Excellent work!Richard Nowell (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2016 (UTC)