Empowerment Research

Within such an empowerment framework, research and program evaluation can serve as supports and means of community practice. Congruent with the traditional mission and goals of community practice, these forms of social inquiry empower community residents, citizens groups, service users, workers, and other constituencies to examine and improve their individual and collective lives. Through their participation, these groups ensure that a study attends to their issues, is enriched by their experiences and contributions, and develops their research competence. Fundamentally, empowerment research and evaluation build civic capacities and promote community well-being. These strategies build collective efficacy within the group as well as individual self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). Through participation in empowerment research processes, participants' experiences and perceptions—their local knowledge—are validated and they learn that their appraisals matter in the research and evaluation efforts.

Both empowerment research and empowerment program evaluation share the broad goals of social investigation. Like other types of social research, empowerment research seeks to generate “usable knowledge” to resolve social issues (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). Like its counterparts, empowerment program evaluation is focused on gathering knowledge to improve social programming (Schalock, 1995; Shadish, Cook, & Leviton, 1991). Although the purposes of empowerment research and program evaluation are encompassed by these larger investigatory domains, their primary evaluative standard is whether the study promotes the empowerment of individuals and communities. The focus on empowerment helps to foster understanding not only of how inquiry constructs knowledge but how we create “formative narratives” to set the contingent and variable identities of diverse groups within a common cause (Giroux, 1991, p. 22).

From Kuhn's (1970) perspective, normal science is defined by the ascendency of a research community that determines the questions to be asked, the methods to employ in answering these questions, and the answers to accept as legitimate. For the findings to be collectively appraised, the research community must be informed of the study's design and relevant findings. Accordingly, scientific investigation refers to seeking answers to questions in a systematic manner subject to the evaluation of other researchers (Hammersley, 1992, p. 138). Flexibly adapting methods from participatory action research, empowerment studies include and affirm diverse people and groups among the research community and, thus, expand the group that specifies and reviews the research or evaluation's agenda, processes, and conclusions.

Empowerment studies are shaped by the participants' unique aspirations and contexts and therefore do not conform to one single model. Participants' level and type of involvement may vary; some participants may do all the research and evaluation on their own, or take on specific tasks, or act as consultants to the researchers. Finally, the structure of empowerment research is not limited to strictly quantitative or qualitative methods. Instead, it is characterized as a form of social inquiry, because this term encompasses the various intellectual legacies seeking to explain, understand, or criticize the social world (Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977). Drawing on the history of social work in the United States, this chapter proposes the following distinguishing features of empowerment research and program evaluation:

• an ontology (theory of the world) of individual and collective empowerment,
• an epistemology (theory of knowledge) of cultural safety and indigenous knowledge, and
• a methodology (theory of research) of local and global significance and stewardship.

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