Participatory Action Research Posted on March 19, 2007 Maria Elena Torre (bio) describes a qualitative approach that focuses on collaboration through action.

Participatory action research is a stance within qualitative research where there's an operating assumption that knowledge is produced through social relations collaboratively through action.

And so, the work that I've done most recently has been with high school students in 12 high schools, actually in the New York, New Jersey area, and that greater metropolitan area, and they're young people who have been trained as researchers and who we have been working collaboratively with to examine educational inequities in their schools in what's been called the "academic achievement gap" which they have renamed the "opportunity gap."

This was one young person in particular: "I'm interested in working with you all and becoming a youth researcher, but I'm not gonna do it if we're gonna call it an 'achievement gap' study, because it's really not about gaps in achievement or about who's smarter and who's not smart. It's really about who has access to what kinds of opportunities."

And then, of course, there's a little group of young people all gathering around, and they're like, "Yeah, so really this project should be called the 'opportunity gap' project, not the 'achievement gap'."

So, right there's reflective of when you bring in to the research team the very folks who are in the middle of the research, who traditionally would be researched upon, they have a different framework for understanding what the issues are, what the problems are, what needs to be done, what questions should be asked, where to look for evidence, and so, inviting those folks into the very beginnings of the research process can shift the entire agenda.

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