Community-Based Participatory Research

The purpose of this co-authored, qualitative, action research study was to examine how to empower youth to become active participants in their communities. Citizen engagement in community and public life is vital to a healthy democracy and young people have a unique place in community citizenry, but are often dismissed or excluded from decision-making. The research team developed a model, the Youth Participatory Empowerment Model (YPEM), to guide youth through a process of identifying and engaging a community heritage or social justice need in their community. The team assembled a guidebook of activities to engage groups in difficult self, group, and community work. To test the model, each of the six members of the research team implemented YPEM to engage youth in six locations throughout the United States. The members of each group represent a diverse sampling of the country and include tribal, undocumented, rural, suburban, and urban youth from low income or underserved populations. Researchers collected interview and observation data to identify themes and strategies that support community youth leadership. The model seeks to cultivate youth voice, youth engagement, and youth empowerment and to assist group mentors with this process. The results of the six groups highlight the importance of youth leadership, trust and safety, partnerships, and multidimensional mentorship. These observations led to the development of an updated version of YPEM, which includes the four main observations and strategies that proved successful in the field.

(Society for American Archaeology, Annual Meeting 2019)This poster documents a community-based archaeology and oral history project in the Bahamas, and makes the case for accessible, digital methods in recording and preserving sites in areas vulnerable to development, climate change, and economic difficulties. The site in question was a 19th century plantation estate on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which was left by the last owner to the descendants of her former slaves and servants in 1871. This descendant community still maintains their rights to this acreage and continue to live on this and surrounding lands. Under a framework of contemporary archaeology, this project utilized a combination of pedestrian survey, digital mapping, photo documentation, and oral history interviews to create a community archive of life in the region over the past 200 years through present day. This poster illustrates several key methods within the community-based and collaborative project to study and preserve the historical and cultural landscape of the area, including the construction of a Google Tour of standing structures, compilation of a historical report, and the creation of 360-degree panoramas which can be used to recreate sites in virtual reality.

Social capital discourse has come to be the foremost and essential aspects in achieving sustainable development, participatory democracy and just cities. Indonesia is like most Asian countries where people spatially and socially co-live in a community that is related to a network of small clusters. However, the formal study related to social capital is hardly founded. Based on its characters, Gotong Royong which is a socio-cultural ethic of the togetherness philosophy in Indonesia can be perceived as an Indonesian social capital practice. Advancing social capital through participatory approaches will need a deep consideration about the role of professional and community engagement. Successful collaborations between wider actors in participatory approaches could lead to a fundamental transformation that can both preserve and nurture social capital values. High level of social capital within communities can potentially underpin the successful community participation towards communal goals. Abstrak: Konsep tentang modal sosial muncul sebagai aspek utama dalam mencapai pembangunan berkelanjutan, demokrasi partisipatif, dan pembangunan kota yang adil. Indonesia seperti banyak negara di Asia, kebanyakan penduduknya hidup secara berkelompok dalam satu komunitas jaringan atau kelompok kecil. Namun studi formal tentang modal sosial di Indonesia masih sulit ditemui. Mengacu pada karakter dasarnya, Gotong Royong sebagai moral kultural-sosial dari nilai filosofis kebersamaan di Indonesia dapat diterjemahkan sebagai praktek modal sosial di Indonesia. Di lain sisi, meningkatkan potensi modal sosial melalui pendekatan partisipatif memerlukan pertimbangan mendalam terhadap peran professional dan keterlibatan komunitas. Kolaborasi efektif banyak aktor dalam pendekatan partisipatif akan membawa dampak transformatif yang dapat mempertahankan sekaligus meningkatkan nilai-nilai dari modal sosial. Kadar modal sosial yang tinggi diantara komunitas dapat mendukung kesuksesan partisipatif komunitas menuju tujuan-tujuan bersama.

This guide argues that engaged scholarship, in which academics and other professional researchers collaborate with community members and organizations, should be the preferred approach for researchers who are committed to environmental justice. This is because environmental justice not only requires us to share environmental burdens and benefits more equitably, but also demands that we democratize control over environmental knowledge and decision making to include historically marginalized communities. The means and ends of engaged scholarship can best help researchers fulfill this dual commitment to the democratic process and equitable environmental outcomes.

The guide is intended for academic scholars, other professional researchers, and their community partners interested in collaborating on this kind of work.

The first part of the guide defines and describes the development of EJ and engaged scholarship, showing why they are well-suited to one another. In the process, it offers a brief summary of the major literature on both topics. Part two offers a brief review of some of the characteristic research methods of engaged scholarship on EJ, such as community mapping, environmental exposure monitoring, photovoice and participatory video, storytelling and community arts, and more. Part three summarizes the challenges that university-community partners face in their work together and how they can address them. It also discusses potential difficulties of conducting this kind of research in academic institutions that have yet to fully embrace engaged scholarship. This part draws on solutions developed by practitioners and suggests areas for further transformation of academia to make it more hospitable to engaged work. The final part lists useful resources on environmental justice and engaged scholarship and a list of references.

The meme is an idea, element of culture or behavior passed down from one person to another through imitation. A more specific form of meme is the internet meme, which involves images, videos, text, or other content rapidly spread, and often modified, over the internet, and sometimes transcending the mere digital into the material world. Internet memes are often global and therefore help establish commonality between people across cultures, oceans, and national boundaries. They also can help further knit together particular communities already bonded through digital interaction. Yet, despite the cultural impact and pervasiveness of these virtual memes and artifacts in the late-20th and early-21st century, the heritage field has only just begun to recognize the importance and impact of online sub-cultures and viral phenomenon, and the future heritage value that these sub-cultures and phenomenon will hold. Meme historians are few and meme museums even more scarce. Because internet memes and cultures evolve so rapidly, and website links often move or expire, many, probably most, of these virtual objects and intangible heritages, are in danger of being forgotten and lost over the long term. Compounding this difficulty is the sheer volume of memes and artifacts to curate and sift through for selective preservation. This thesis explores the research question of how to select internet memes for preservation as virtual tangible and intangible heritage, and postulates that participatory, community-based efforts could prove invaluable to developing a selection strategy.

The meme is an idea, element of culture or behavior passed down from one person to another through imitation. A more specific form of meme is the internet meme, which involves images, videos, text, or other content rapidly spread, and often modified, over the internet, and sometimes transcending the mere digital into the material world. Internet memes are often global and therefore help establish commonality between people across cultures, oceans, and national boundaries. They also can help further knit together particular communities already bonded through digital interaction. Yet, despite the cultural impact and pervasiveness of these virtual memes and artifacts in the late-20th and early-21st century, the heritage field has only just begun to recognize the importance and impact of online sub-cultures and viral phenomenon, and the future heritage value that these sub-cultures and phenomenon will hold. Meme historians are few and meme museums even more scarce. Because internet memes and cultures evolve so rapidly, and website links often move or expire, many, probably most, of these virtual objects and intangible heritages, are in danger of being forgotten and lost over the long term. Compounding this difficulty is the sheer volume of memes and artifacts to curate and sift through for selective preservation. This thesis explores the research question of how to select internet memes for preservation as virtual tangible and intangible heritage, and postulates that participatory, community-based efforts could prove invaluable to developing and implementing selection strategies.

Researchers have uncovered various ways that refugees in neighboring countries and refugee returnees can change the peacebuilding landscape of their countries. These studies show that refugees demonstrate capacities to contribute to peacebuilding in diverse ways, including enhancement of safety and security, political processes, and revitalization of economic, justice, and reconciliation systems. The above findings notwithstanding, we know little about the peacebuilding role of millions of resettled refugees. This article, therefore, highlights Canada's resettlement of Liberian refugees, integration experiences, and some peacebuilding engagement activities of resettled refugees as well as factors that contribute to their (dis)engagement. The evidence from the data indicates that resettled refugees are a resource for peacebuilding waiting to be tapped and whose engagement reinforces the complementarity of state-led and community-based approaches to peacebuilding.

Within health, community engagement is positioned as either a means, or an end. It is often framed as an apolitical, linear, and/or individualistic process, thus eschewing the relational or socio-structural factors that inform it. Although the rhetoric of engagement can be found across multiple policy, program and funding documents, the ways in which engagement is understood (or enacted) are rarely explored. As a fuzzy concept, it regularly morphs across contexts, leading many including those working in the HIV sector to note that engagement is undertheorized. Picturing Participation: Exploring Engagement in HIV Programming, Service Provision and Care is a community-based participatory research project, co-led by a team of community members, staff and academic researchers. It uses case study design and photovoice to explore how stakeholders conceptualize engagement within and across different HIV organizational sites: an AIDS service organization, a youth HIV prevention program and a sub-acute HIV hospital. This dissertation is nested in this larger project; it contains several sole and co-authored elements, including: an introduction, a community-report that provides an overview of key project findings, three stand-alone manuscripts, poetry, photography and installations. The first co-authored manuscript explores how participants use of journey metaphors illustrates their understandings of engagement as relational, temporal, and informed by organizational contexts and stakeholder roles. In the second manuscript, I put youths narratives of non-participation in conversation with decolonial and critical scholarship on the politics of refusal, neoliberalism, will, and the call to participate. This reading demonstrates how not participating can be productively read as a self-determined form of resistance. The last two chapters explore what new conditions of possibility are created for (co)-theorizing engagement if engagement is approached as a beyond. The third manuscript explores how my theoretical conceptions as a researcher/facilitator inevitably shaped the design and implementation of the methods used. I explore the methodological opportunities of bridging photovoice with site-specific installations, and working with the crafted-nature of images. The discussion proposes a new way of theorizing engagement as a dynamic, affective and pedagogical (and thus relational and ethical) process. It shares a researcher-produced installation as a site to reflect on the opportunities and tensions of doing collaborative, interdisciplinary doctoral work.

http://hdl.handle.net/10315/35882

We currently see an interdisciplinary shift toward a
“participatory turn” in health research and promotion
under which community engagement, shared decision
making and planning, and the use of visual and digital
methods have become paramount. Digital storytelling
(DST) is one such innovative and engaging method
increasingly used in applied health interventions, with
a growing body of research identifying its value. Despite
its increasing use, a standard approach to empirically
assess the impacts on individuals participating in DST
interventions does not currently exist. In this article, we
define DST as a distinct narrative intervention, illustrate
key elements that inform the methodology, and
present a conceptual model to examine how DST may
contribute to increased socioemotional well-being and
bolster positive health outcomes. Our proposed model
is informed by elements of narrative theory, Freirian
conscientization, multimodality, and social cognitive
theory and can serve as a guide for public health practitioners
and researchers interested in assessing the
potential benefits of DST as an applied health intervention.
Recommendations for practice call for a rigorous
methodological approach to apply and test this model
across a range of health contexts and populations.

Abstract
This study assesses the communication approaches deployed in Dawanau Psychiatric Hospital (DPH), Kanau state, to foster mental health development of the society as a mandate of the hospital. This is in the wake of rising global threat of mental health issues. Mental health disorder has taken its toll on mankind, particularly since the last three decades. Not less than 51 new cases of mental disorders were reported daily in Dawanau Psychiatric Hospital (DPH), Kanau. In addition, 21.1 million Nigerians suffers from psychiatric disorders and there is the fear of exponential increase in the nearest future considering the fact that one in every four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorder at some point in their life time. Knowing that psychiatric disorder is a leading global cause of ill health and disability is even more worrisome. Worst, stigmatization and discrimination against victims of mental disorders keeps mounting with ignorance being the driving wheel. On these premise, this research seeks to engender better use of communication by Dawanau Psychiatric Hospital, Kano to treat and forestall the occurrence of mental disorder in Kano State and beyond, through reactive and proactive approaches with adequate participation and involvement of the people in the fight against the surge of mental disorder. The study used qualitative method of data collection through the instruments of Key Informant Interview, Focus group Discussion, and Observations to elicit data used in this study. It was discovered that DPH’s communication approaches have been top to down with emphasis on prognosis rather than root cause(s).  The research also found out that almost everybody is susceptible to mental disorder but some psychological, biological, environmental and social factors could predispose people more to psychiatric illnesses. The study therefore, proposed participatory communication approaches through advocacy, dialogue, and community action programmes to make up for the inadequacies of the existing approaches for a mentally healthier society.

Variety of readings available on Moodle Course Description This course will introduce learners to a variety of methodological ways of investigating our social world as well as how to use these methods to investigate race and ethnicity. In addition, we will focus heavily on more applied (or public) ways of conducting research that are explicitly linked to informing social policy, programs, and practice. This also means we will spend more time working in collaborative research environments. I hope to inform your understanding of how research can be conducted for more than just the sake of research, but instead how research can be linked to improving the lives of people in general, and people of color specifically. Course Objectives • Identify the relationship between theoretical orientations and research methods • Familiarize learners with different research methods and designs • Explore differences between "traditional" and "critical" methods of social inquiry • Understand ethical considerations of research (particularly Lawrence student research) • Develop skills in making social change through problem-based research • Develop communication skills through face to face discussions and discussion leading • Develop writing skills via assignments during the session Course Format We will engage in a variety of learning activities during the term. We will have PowerPoint lecture for the first part of class to explain the larger points of the readings. Students are expected to take notes during those times. Second part of class will be the workshop-based part of class. It will be dedicated to some sort of engagement with the method learned. So, for instance, students might need to find and read an article that uses the method learned that week and teach it to their peers, or critique it and explain what is wrong, or apply it to other scenarios in which it will best solve a problem. Students will also be given the opportunity to engage in some of the methods. That is, students will craft survey questions during quantitative methods week, do basic statistics in excel, conduct an interview during

The present study aimed to understand the resettlement experiences of Syrian refugees, who are resettled in Ankara, Turkey, with respect to their strengths and assets. Thisstudy conducted under the framework of a community-based participatory research approach (CBPR). Seven adult Syrians (4 females, 3 males) with a mean age of 24.14 (SD=4.33) were reached with the help of community partners and attended in semi-structured interviews. The content analysis of the interviews was completedthrough a qualitative data analysis program Atlas.ti.. Research partners are involved in the analysis by providing feedback on completed analysis. Results of the study pointed out that language barriers, acts of discrimination, unemployment, being exposed to multiple losses and being away from their family members were negatively correlated with refugees’ psychosocial wellbeing and adjustment as well. On the other hand, understanding the language, being employed, accessing to basic rights and social and economic resources, having previously settled relatives in Turkey and getting citizenship appeared as positive factors impact refugees’ adjustment process via decreasing number of resettlement stressors and pave the way for accessing to other resources. Moreover, family ties and social network, hope for future, similarity of cultures and relative freedom for Syrian women appeared as strengths and assets of Syrians. These results are discussed in relation to refugees’ resettlement and adjustment process literature. The implications of the results were provided for policy makers, psychological health professionals and nongovernmental organizations (NGO).
Key words: Refugees; Syrians; Community-Based Participatory Research;
Adjustment