Participatory Action Research Involving "All the Players" in Evaluation and Change

• The website of the Participatory Action Research Collective at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Also see www.changingminds.ws for a detailed description of a particular project.

1. Determine that the evaluators have adequate facilitation skills to identify and engage all relevant stakeholders, as well as to help participants learn. If this is not the case, be certain that appropriate and effective facilitators are present on the team.

There will always be those who argue that Participatory Action Research (PAR) gives up the neutrality, objectivity, and distance that characterize “gold standard” evaluative science.

Do evaluator partners in PAR need specialized skills and sensibilities?

From Community Teams to Statewide Policy. To “develop trusting partnerships,” there was “plenty of schmoozing time over spaghetti dinners,” recalled the lead evaluator of a PAR research program to engage parents, nonprofit service providers, and teachers in interventions for children who showed signs of developmental delays.

PAR is probably not the approach to take when you are, according to a grantmaker, seeking “demographic or cultural data,” or in the words of an evaluator, “looking at larger patterns, rates, changes over time,” or trying to demonstrate the results of an intervention by comparison with a control group.

• No one way. PAR evolves from and must be attentive to local context. It is, according to a leader of international development projects, “not a model, but an approach.”

Participatory Action Research (PAR) offers grantmakers opportunities to bring applied research and evaluation skills to those closest to the issues involved. PAR evaluation promotes positive change as it produces objective data, building knowledge that communities and communities of practice can put to use in strengthening themselves...