Methods

Participatory Action Research: Origins, the Research Cycle and How to Run a Project

Methods · By the Common Inquiry editorial team · Published 2026-10-26

A group of men seated on mats and chairs in a courtyard under a tree, listening to a facilitator during a discussion
A focus group discussion organised by a civil society organisation in Vehari, Pakistan. US government photo (USAID Pakistan), public domain.

Participatory action research, usually shortened to PAR, is research done with people rather than on them, with the explicit aim of changing the situation being studied. The people affected by a problem take part in defining the questions, gathering and interpreting evidence, and deciding what to do with it. This guide explains where the approach comes from, how a PAR cycle works, and what tends to go wrong.

Where participatory action research comes from

The phrase "action research" is generally traced to the German-American social psychologist Kurt Lewin, whose 1946 article "Action Research and Minority Problems", published in the Journal of Social Issues, described research that leads to social action, organised as "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action". Lewin worked on intergroup relations and workplace change, and his teams tested changes in real settings rather than in the laboratory.

The "participatory" part came later and largely from the global South. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first published in English in 1970, argued that people learn and act most effectively when they analyse their own reality together, through dialogue rather than instruction. In Colombia, the sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda worked with peasant and fishing communities on the Caribbean coast and became one of the best-known advocates of what he called investigación-acción participativa. A world symposium on action research held in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1977 is often cited as a moment when these strands came together internationally.

In parallel, development practitioners such as Robert Chambers at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK popularised participatory rural appraisal in the late 1980s and 1990s, a toolkit of visual and group methods (maps, seasonal calendars, ranking exercises) that made it easier for people without formal schooling to lead parts of an inquiry. Public health researchers in North America developed community-based participatory research, a close cousin with its own set of principles.

What makes research "participatory action research"

There is no single official definition, but most textbooks and university guides agree on a few features:

Not every project that involves the public meets this bar. Consulting residents through a single survey, or inviting a community representative to an advisory board, is useful but is not PAR. Sherry Arnstein's "ladder" and later typologies, explained in our article on levels of participation, help teams be honest about where they really stand.

The PAR cycle in practice

Most guides present PAR as a cycle that repeats until the group is satisfied, or the funding ends. In a real project the stages overlap, but the sequence below is a reasonable plan.

  1. Build the group and agree on the problem. Hold open meetings, listen before proposing, and agree a question the group cares about and can realistically investigate. Write down who is in the core team, how decisions will be taken and how people will be paid or compensated for their time.
  2. Plan the inquiry. Decide what evidence would answer the question: existing statistics, interviews, a door-to-door survey, observation, photographs, mapping. Choose methods the co-researchers can use with confidence after training. Settle ethical questions now, including consent and data storage.
  3. Act and collect. Gather the data, often in pairs that combine a community member with a university researcher or trained volunteer. Keep a shared log of what was done, where and by whom.
  4. Observe and analyse together. Hold analysis workshops where the whole group sorts quotes, reads charts and argues about interpretations. Visual methods such as sorting cards on a wall make it easier for everyone to take part.
  5. Reflect and decide. Ask what the evidence means, what action follows, and what the group would do differently next time. The action itself (a meeting with a council, a new service, a public exhibition) then becomes the starting point of the next cycle.

Many PAR projects use creative methods inside this cycle. Photovoice, in which participants photograph their surroundings and discuss the pictures, and participatory mapping are two of the most widely documented.

Housing is one of the most common subjects. Tenants' associations frequently apply the same cycle to damp, repairs and rents, and our guide to researching housing conditions with residents walks through each stage.

Roles in a PAR team

A typical team brings together three kinds of people, sometimes overlapping:

Write these roles down. Many partnerships between universities and community organisations now use a short written agreement covering decision-making, money, data ownership and authorship.

Rigour: is PAR "real" research?

A common objection is that research done by non-specialists, with an agenda for change, cannot be objective. PAR practitioners answer in two ways. First, the usual tools of rigour still apply: clear questions, transparent methods, systematic data collection, triangulation between sources and honest reporting of limits. Second, involving the people concerned often improves validity. Residents know which survey questions will be misunderstood, which places matter, and which explanations ring false. The test is whether another reader can follow how the group moved from data to conclusions.

Quality criteria proposed for action research typically include the relevance of the question to participants, the quality of the participation itself, the soundness of the methods, and the usefulness of the outcomes. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury's Handbook of Action Research (Sage, first edition 2001) is the standard academic reference on these debates.

Common pitfalls

Where to learn more

Many universities publish free introductory guides. The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement in the UK hosts guidance on community-university research, including the ethical principles for community-based participatory research produced with Durham University's Centre for Social Justice and Community Action. Classic texts include Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Fals-Borda and Rahman's edited volume Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action-Research (1991) and Chambers' Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last (1997).

Sources

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