Community-Based Research

Characteristics of Community-Based Research

Community-based research is grounded in Indigenous and ethnic community studies and in feminist epistemologies. Various Aboriginal, Mexican American, and African American communities have also engaged in continuing efforts at decolonizing ways of knowing and understanding the increasingly globalized world. Black community studies arose in university discourse to criticize domination by Western White epistemologies. From the turn of the 20th century, this work stressed the importance of subjective interpretations of human experience, ethnic diversity in experience as the foundation for learning, and commitment to scholarship that linked research, pedagogical praxis, and community service. From DuBois and contemporary Black writers of his time, there emerged a commitment to research that would improve the daily lives of people of color; the service orientation they envisioned was conceived as an opportunity for reciprocal benefit in collaborations between universities and society. This early vision of community-centered action by university researchers was reinvigorated during the 1960s, and again during the early 1990s, through university and community efforts to establish “Black agenda projects” in the United States. These early scholars in Black studies founded the strong tradition of action-centered, political community discourse about diversity that is central to community-based research.

Similarly, feminist epistemologies have generated community-based research practices in which a relational ontology of self–other defines situated knowledge and partial perspectives. This is, again, overtly political research that privileges the participant's own understanding and processes for meaning-making over those of the researcher. In serving the community, feminist researchers strive to redefine the role of the researcher from one of distant impartiality to structure research through interactions and relationships based in empathy, mutuality, and respect for the expert knowledge of the participant.

Ethnic and feminist epistemologies encouraged a tradition of situated research that is continued today in numerous examples of community-based research.

Community-based research is a feature, characteristic, or (alternatively) a condition on which participatory action research, performance ethnography, critical arts-based inquiry, and other new paradigm approaches are contingent.

These and other strands of community-based research exist simultaneously. There are, however, commonalities in the various theories and approaches to performing research in the community. Community-based research across the disciplines addresses positionality, reflexivity, collaboration, voice, and praxis, and it embraces an ethics based in human caring. All community-based research is grounded in methodologies [Page 98]that challenge privileged access to truth, impartiality, and scientific objectivity. As such, it draws on the “situated knowledge” of both the researcher and the researched (or research participants); that is, knowing depends on the contexts (space and time marked by borders and interruptions) in which it occurs.

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