About

Participatory Action Research (PAR) has a rich global history, originating in the Latin American social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and later gaining momentum worldwide as a collaborative approach that values local knowledge and collective action. Influenced by the ideas of Paulo Freire, a pioneering educator and advocate for dialogue, empowerment, and critical consciousness, PAR emphasizes participatory methods that empower communities to take ownership of their research and social change processes. Community based participatory research (CBPR) casts a wider net and includes several participatory approaches including PAR, all of which are included in a small subset of community engaged research (CEnR). CBPR methodologies are community-driven from the identification of a research question to publication and dissemination.

Ethics training is required for all research studies and became a requirement after several large-scale incidents of research misconduct that subjected participants to harmful interventions. The training focuses on key ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, justice, nonmaleficence, confidentiality, and honesty.

Institutional review boards (IRBs) were subsequently developed in the United States through the National Research act to protect research participants and guide safe and ethical research. Although this has been standardized in the United States, there is significant variability in ethical oversight infrastructure in low-resource settings. Furthermore, many of these populations are at extremely high risk for research misconduct, given potential socio-economic vulnerabilities. Although international guidelines exist through the Declaration of Helsinki, and several ethics training programs are available to facilitate general research ethics training, there remains a large gap in community governed ethics training and research ethics oversight. This is of particular need for community researchers engaged in participatory research methodologies as formal research ethics can be out-of-context.

Our mission for the MacMillan Program in Global Participatory Research and Ethics is to foster inclusive, ethical, and culturally relevant research practices, with a special focus on participatory methodologies. We aim to amplify community voices and promote sustainable development of ethics training that extends beyond standard institutional training.