Doing participatory qualitative research: development of a shared critical consciousness with racial minority research advisory group members

Introduction

The grand endeavor of participatory, community-based, social justice research can offer profound opportunities for growth and exchange through ongoing processes of collaboration among professionals, academics, and community members involved in the research process. In this article, we discuss our engagement with racialized minority youth who are members of a research advisory group (RAG) for a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)–funded research project and the insights gained for the process of participatory research from this engagement. It is important to note that this article is not presenting the results and analysis of the entire study or the complete findings from one site. Rather, the focus of this article is to share the preliminary theoretical and methodological insights gained while working with a RAG, community collaborators, and researchers—all core members of participatory, community-based research projects. We begin by briefly reviewing some literature on participatory approaches and then continue by sharing an overview of the research project and its aims. We follow this with a discussion of critical issues that arose during meetings with the RAG and then link this to the literature to assist with the conceptualization of our experiences in order to provide some insights into the management of similar issues in the future projects. By delving into the critical issues surrounding a profound reluctance among RAG members, researchers, and community collaborators to talk about the issues of race, we gained an appreciation for benefits of a shared dialogical process, the development of a shared critical consciousness, and reflecting on contradictions within community-based participatory projects. These understandings provide useful recommendations for working effectively with RAGs. The insights in this article are a result of discussions at RAG meetings that were held throughout the project.

A brief review of participatory approaches

Participatory approaches to research have been described as valuing community collaboration, empowerment, participation, and dynamic processes that are reflexive and reflective while addressing social problems in pursuit of social justice (Kindon et al., 2007; McIntyre, 2008; Morris, 2002). Participatory research projects have been used to understand and address a broad range of issues, across varying populations, using a diverse set of approaches to research. Some specific examples include a study of poverty from the perspective of those who are poor (Collins, 2005), a study of enterprise capacity in Darfur and Southern Sudan (Abdelnour et al., 2008), a study of local responses to the food needs of homeless in Toronto (Wellesley Institute, 2008), and a study of racialization and health inequity (The Inner City Health Strategy Working Group, 2010). Some of the key contributors to participatory approaches include Paulo Freire and Orlando Fals-Borda whose work in Latin America stimulated interest in community development, education, action, and empowerment for marginalized groups who felt powerless to effect change (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991; Freire, 1970, 1973). Other examples of key contributors include William Foote White and Patricia Maguire who have developed participatory principles for research and feminist approaches (Maguire, 1987; Whyte, 1991).

Poststructural critiques of participatory research have exposed how power can be exercised through the use of co-opted emancipatory discourse such as ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ to make community members’ expectations fit the plans of the researchers (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). While noting this potential for ‘tyranny’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001), participatory approaches have been described as useful as they tend to depart from ‘more oppressive and less self-reflexive forms of power’ (Kesby et al., 2007: 25). Kesby acknowledges the poststructural critique but argues that rather than resisting ‘participation’, we must acknowledge power and domination in all places and recognize how to prioritize our use of resistance for social justice (i.e. should we resist participation or prioritize resistance to the spread of HIV) (Kesby, 2005). When survival is an issue, the privilege to deconstruct without constructing alternatives is not an option. This acknowledgement allows us to retheorize resistance to counter its reification and false position as the opposite of power in order develop an understanding that appreciates the pervasiveness of power (Kesby, 2005). This retheorization examines empowerment within particular spatial arrangements and performative spaces to understand when, how, and why power operates (Kesby, 2005). This more nuanced analysis of power and empowerment can be useful when engaging in community-based research that values the potential benefits of participatory approaches and the operations of power within them.

Overview of project

Since the focus of this article is on the dynamics that took place within RAG meetings, details of the project are minimally shared with a view to providing the reader with some information on the project while not detracting from the central focus of the article. The overall aim of this study is to understand increasing youth violence in major Western cities like Toronto, Paris, and London. Traditionally, youth violence for racialized minorities has been seen either as a problem of youth resulting in the need for their increased regulation or as the problem of social structures that requires policy change. Our study shifts from these polarized positions to explore youth violence as a profoundly relational process of Self and Other, as a response to their experiences of violence, and as a strategy to heal from the significant wounds of injustice. Our study sought to explore the following research questions:

The entire project has four research sites across Canada, comprising of youth from diverse racialized minority backgrounds to gain a depth of understanding from various perspectives. Over 80 male and female research participants aged between 18 and 24 years from a broad spectrum of racialized minority communities (e.g. African, Arab, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Latino (a), South Asian, and South East Asian) have participated in focus groups and individual interviews. The discussions in this article relate to one research site. Each focus group was also facilitated by at least one member of the RAG matching the ethno/racial group being facilitated. For example, with the Arab group, one of the facilitators was an Arab community collaborator from the Arab Community Centre of Toronto.

Methodology

Key decisions on research design and selection of participants were to be made in consultation with the RAGs. Initially, the university researchers and community partner agencies proposed some parameters to provide working material for the consultation. We anticipated participatory and action-oriented strategies of data generation and interpretation, for example, ethnographic and projective narrative conversations (Chambon, 1994, 1995, 2003), and the use of ‘favorite objects’ and ‘favorite activities’ as evocative prompts (Kumsa, 2004, 2006, 2007). Like others (Finley, 2005; Hussey, 2006), we value performative, arts-based approaches, and the use of symbols for narrative conversation

We conducted two rounds of data generation. The first were small focus group conversations as a way of brainstorming and tapping into the synergistic effects of groups. The second were in-depth, one-to-one conversations with each small group participant. Focus group conversations and individual interviews were taped and transcribed with the consent of participants who had all given written informed consent. The study also received institutional ethics approvals prior to the start of the study

We initially embarked on creating RAGs at each site in order to consult with them to further refine the goals and objectives of the project, define the tools of the research, and solicit empirically grounded input of the RAGs to set the parameters and develop strategies for the selection of research participants. We anticipated that encounters with the RAG would provide the first empirical dip into the field, and this empirically grounded shift would facilitate the further refining of our qualitative research tools.

RAGs and their roles

The RAG members in this project matched the population of study. We recruited youth between the ages of 18–24 years from a broad spectrum of racialized minority communities (e.g. African, Arab, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Latino (a), South Asian, and South East Asian). RAG members were recruited through partnering agencies and were informed about the project. An overview of the rationale for having RAGs, that is, the need to have research overseen by participants close in age to the population of interest to the research, was discussed during the first RAG meeting. There were six members in the RAG during the period of our first meeting (discussed in this article), but this number has since fluctuated as two RAG members had conflicting commitments. The primary investigator provided workshops for RAG members, university researchers, students, and community partners involved with the project on conceptual and methodological issues, data generation activities, research background, and preliminary, tentative research questions.

RAG members participated in planning for the project, facilitated focus groups and individual interview (data generation activities), and assisted with the transcription and analysis of the data. University researchers worked in collaboration with RAG member with the help of student research assistants to conduct the research and coordinated the project at the site level. The community partner agencies worked alongside the university researchers, and RAG members to recruit participants, provide input on community issues and perspectives and assist with the overall project coordination as well as data analysis. The student research assistants also recorded notes and minutes from RAG meetings that were reviewed by the group after every meeting. The goal was to have RAGs, university researchers, community partners, and students actively involved in thinking through all parts of the research, including deciding on the research questions to ask in focus groups.

Past research on RAGs—impacts and engagement

The idea of having RAGs is well documented in the participatory and action-oriented research and even more so in research with members of racialized and other vulnerable communities (Booth et al., 2002; Cotterell, 2008; Maiter et al., 2008; Newell and South, 2009; Porter et al., 2006). However, there is very little research examining how community advisory groups work with participatory projects. Essentially, partnership and principles of self-determination, equity, and social justice are recognized as keys to community-based participatory research that aims to break down barriers between the researchers and researched. Community partners are valued as equal contributors to the research project; thus, RAGs consisted of members of the community researched are acknowledged to be essential to this approach.

Critical issues at meetings with RAGs

Although the researchers had all previously participated in community-based participatory action research projects (CBPARs), some events in the first few meetings continued to surprise us and required us to think beyond our taken-for-granted notions of engaging with community participants. Our initial explanation of the project and the notion of exploring the experiences of the racialized youth who made up the RAG resulted in RAG members making some of the following comments:

These are just a few examples of the initial responses from the RAG members at all sites, capturing, in our opinion, a distancing from race and race-related exclusions/experiences in Canadian society. In discussing this among the research team, we explored several reasons for this response in relation to the Self and Other:

These responses from RAG members who were to assist us in refining questions for the project left us perplexed. We had considerable academic and practice insights that we brought to the project, and we wondered if there was something else we were missing. As we pondered this, one of the community collaborators representing an ethno-specific social service agency on the project community discussed some of the experiences and struggles with racism and discrimination that individuals and families coming to his agency have encountered in Canada. This sharing then led to a slow and profound discussion of experiences of RAG members that they had not initially wanted to discuss. RAG members provided many examples of situations that they had experienced but were reluctant to identify as racism. They also began to highlight the importance of discussing experiences of racism and validating them. Some examples include the following ¹ :

Many other discussions ensued where participants discussed the overt and covert experiences of exclusion that may or may not have been because of race but that it was easier to consider that it was for reasons other than race. We recognized that some of the comments correspond with research by Lund (2006), which has highlighted the ‘tendency of educators and others to engage in denial and avoidance when discussing issues surrounding racism, and how that affects the daily work on social justice projects in schools’ (p. 203). As one of the participants in Lund’s study states, ‘developing a critical sensibility among young people is a vital first step … toward eliminating racism in Canada’ (Lund, 2006: 215). Lund also highlights that students can play a key role in ‘rocking the boat’ to point the way to reform and can ‘contribute a richness of understandings of emergent theorizing on social justice work’ (Lund, 2006: 219).

These experiences from one site were shared with researchers from other sites, who expressed that they had also experienced similar processes. For other sites as well, these processes shifted from an initial reluctance or denial to discuss issues of racism to a shared openness to explore common experiences. We would suggest that the development of a shared critical consciousness or conscientization took place for all members involved in the project: the university researchers, students, RAG members, and community social service collaborators. For the researchers, student research assistants, and community collaborators, we gained an in-depth understanding about the profound reluctance to talk about race-related issues.

For RAG members, the discussions opened up space to talk about and explore their own experiences, and once they began to discuss these, they became profoundly committed to the project with a greater sense of ownership and belonging being developed. RAG members began to describe the project as ‘very powerful’ for them as RAG members and ‘important for understanding youth and racism’. The community collaborators and researchers involved in the project shared this feeling of belonging, connection, and understanding with the RAG members. Others have also discussed this sense of ownership developing (Maiter et al., 2008). This transition from a profound reluctance to talk about race-related issues to a critically conscious discussion was facilitated by both the research process and the researchers. The researchers also considered and discussed the issue of introducing a sensitive topic such as racism to people who have demonstrated a reluctance to talk about these issues. The results of these discussions corresponded with Kelly et al. (2001) who suggest that ultimately if a community is deeply divided on the issue to be studied, careful negotiation should take place with the community to arrive at a common issue for study. Additionally, researchers, who also have their own experiences, skills, and interests, should not be fearful of introducing topics for study for a community if a topic has not emerged from the community itself but from the researcher’s knowledge of the community’s issues. Minkler (2004) notes that even if a topic or issue appears to have originated from outside of the community (by those who have observed a problem or issue), involvement of community members in the work to address the issue can result in a sense of ownership for the community members and can also result in the development of further emerging projects by community members who continue to develop capacities for change and growth.

In this project, the research objectives and the issues surrounding racism and discrimination to be studied were reviewed with all participants during recruitment and training. Although the project acted to provoke discussion of these issues for study (from the outside), the experiences of the RAG members (from the community) and their increasing commitment to the project reflected this sense of ownership and development. Thus, although the topic was initially provoked in this project by the researchers and community collaborators, it was a collaborative process and that resulted in the development of a shared critical consciousness that maintained a commitment to the project. In other words, the topic of racism was introduced initially by the researchers (top-down), the insights gained and our deeper understanding of the reluctance to talk about racism came from a collaborative process and a common development of a critical consciousness (a shared benefit and credit). Through this process, we also developed a deeper understanding of our reluctance to talk about racism, an appreciation of the collaborative, community-based research process and recognized the value of the project for everyone involved—for us, this was the development of a share critical consciousness.

Critical consciousness

Critical consciousness and conscientization originate from the ideas of Paulo Freire and Franz Fanon’s concept of consciencizer, that is, the development of an insightful understanding through the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions that then leads to the development of the capacity to act against oppressive elements in one’s life that are illuminated by that understanding (Fanon, 1952; Freire, 1970, 1973). Critical consciousness involves the ability to reflect on one’s personal biases in working collaboratively with individuals and community stakeholders to take action and transform existing obstacles to a satisfactory quality of life (Freire, 1970). Freire insisted that any movement toward critical consciousness could only be ‘authentically’ achieved ‘by working with the people’ directly (Freire, 1973). For Freire, critical consciousness is key to critical action, ‘once man (sic) perceives a challenge, understands it, and recognizes the possibilities of response, he acts. The nature of that action corresponds to the nature of that understanding’ (Freire, 1973: 44).

Critical consciousness has been used in educational training programs and community development initiatives to foster awareness, empowerment, and social justice ideals (Harden, 1996; Watts et al., 2003). The process of becoming critically conscious begins with reflection and the development of awareness (Harden, 1996). Critical consciousness has been applied to training for culture-centered disaster response counselors after hurricane Katrina (Goodman and West-Olatunji, 2009). The study demonstrated an increased consciousness among the participants that appeared to have shifted how they conceptualized and intervened with clients. The views expressed by the participants showed a social justice-oriented perspective, an expected outcome of the development of critical consciousness (Goodman and West-Olatunji, 2009). Critical consciousness has also been applied to social work education to (a) raise critical consciousness, (b) uncover privileged positions that inform research, and (c) conceptualize social work practice that disrupts privilege and oppression (Nicotera and Kang, 2009). The concept has been used from the perspectives of critical race theory (CRT) to examine the development of a critical consciousness necessary to understand the contradictions between the post-civil rights notion of abstract equality and the reality of structurally entrenched inequality (Zamudio et al., 2009). These authors ground their analysis in narratives on the development of their own critical consciousness and how it informs their pedagogy around teaching about the American Civil Rights Movement.

For RAG members, researchers, and community collaborators, the space to discuss experiences of exclusions or discrimination engaged people in a shared process of change where we all bore witness to each other’s growth while gaining an understanding of common systemic, structural, and political issues relevant to these experiences. Racial discrimination continues to exist in Canada as demonstrated by studies on racial inequities in employment, health, earnings, and through Canada’s long history of racialized immigration policies and indigenous colonization that must be understood in both Canadian and transnational contexts (Dua et al., 2005; Robert and Michael, 2002; Veenstra, 2009; Waqfi and Jain, 2008). For many RAG members, the opportunity to share experiences of exclusion and discrimination validated the contradictions present within the broader ‘multicultural Canadian’ discourse to problematize notions, such as ‘There are cultural differences among people in Canada but race does not have an impact on outcomes for people’, that ignore systemic barriers to racial equity and institutionalized forms of exclusion and oppression.

Exploring contradiction

In order to theorize the initial comments of the RAG member, it is important to consider the historical, political, and economic relationships that give context to the internalized discourses that were eventually recognized as contradictory to our experiences.

Franz Fanon demonstrates through his analysis of European-African (specifically French-Afro-Antillean) colonial relationships how the racialized person (the ‘negro’ in Fanon’s example) learns to see himself as inferior to the European through the context of colonization. In the context of Western, White, Eurocentrism, the language and culture of the ‘Antilles Negro’ is ordered as inferior to the French and only through mastery of French language and culture can the ‘negro’ ‘open doors’ for himself/herself in society (Fanon, 1952: 38). This structuring of Eurocentric, Western language, and culture as superior constrains the racialized subject to strip himself or herself of race and culture in the hopes of attaining the privilege of whiteness. As Fanon (1952) describes,

Insofar as he conceives of European culture as a means of stripping himself of his race, he becomes alienated …, it is a question of a victim of a system based on the contempt in which a given branch of humanity is held by a form of civilization that pretends to superiority. (p. 224)

From Fanon’s example we see how the initial reactions of the RAG members that are congruent with the dominant discourse of ‘multicultural Canada’, act to minimize issues of race and view experiences of minority identities as unimportant while advancing ideas that ‘race does not have an impact on outcomes for people’. If we ‘do not see racial differences’, if ‘we don’t need to consider race’ and ‘just work hard’, then we can both assimilate to the dominant culture while ignoring our own identities and the systems, structures, and policies that maintain oppressive regimes that order notions of English-speaking Eurocentric culture and language as superior to those of racialized minority groups or people. These internalized discourses have been said to be exploiting ‘national mythologies’ (Dua et al., 2005).

National mythologies operate to make Canada a white nation. We are constantly led to believe that Europeans built the nation, and in the telling of this history, the conquest, slavery, and continued exploitation of the labour of aboriginal and people of color is suppressed and/or erased. (Dua et al., 2005: 4)

As RAG members participated in this process of the development of a critical consciousness, a reciprocal phenomenon occurred for the researchers and community collaborators. For the researchers and community collaborators, the preliminary feelings of hesitation and doubt from the initial reactions of the RAG members (who were initially reluctant to discuss issue of race) transformed alongside the RAG members (to an openness to discuss these issues, share experiences, and respect the process as dialogical). This process and transformation revealed our shared internalized ambiguity and uncertainty regarding issues of race and discrimination. The researchers and community collaborators discussed how these initial reactions reflected a sense of doubt that our research would capture the experiences of racism and discrimination at all. The transformative process required both patience and opportunities for dialogue with the RAG members to achieve a critically conscious understanding of the broader contexts that facilitate doubt and denial of experiences of exclusion, racism, or discrimination among racialized minorities. With an understanding of these contexts, we developed an in-depth understanding of how experiences of racism and discrimination get minimized as not valuable or significant concerns in the dominant discourse.

Researchers (Neville et al., 2005) have discussed this sense of ‘false consciousness’ that can be present for racialized people. In a study of 211 African/Black Americans on ‘color-blindness’ or ‘the set of beliefs that serves to minimize, ignore, and/or distort the existence of race and racism’, color-blindness was suggested to be a function of false consciousness (holding false beliefs contrary to one’s personal or social interest and maintenance of the disadvantaged position of the self or group), ‘victim blame beliefs about social inequities’ (i.e. it is the individual’s fault or ‘if I work harder I will succeed’) and internalized oppression (the valuing of the dominant group as having a higher status or identifying with this group, that is, the internalization of negative stereotypes against one’s own group) (Neville et al., 2005). These findings support the link between color-blind racial ideology and false consciousness or ‘the degree to which one adopts a cognitive framework that works against his or her own individual or social group interest’ (Neville et al., 2005).

For the RAG members, community collaborators, and researchers, the reciprocal development of these insights through the sharing of experiences and discussion opened up avenues for discussing broader issues in the larger sociopolitical context while remaining attentive to the nuances of individual experience through the examination of contradictions. This reciprocal development of a shared critical consciousness also required a ‘critical self-awareness’, or as Kondrat (1999) outlines, not only can self-awareness involve ‘simple conscious awareness’ (to experience the contents of awareness), or ‘reflective awareness’ (to be able to stand back and observe or critique simple conscious awareness), but also how ‘the self is a construct that is continuously emerging within specific social contexts—that is the self as a co-constructor of his or her immediate worlds of meaning’ (p. 460). Our process involved not only an awareness of the contents of our experience but also the ability to reflect on ourselves, each other, and construct meanings that validated our shared experiences and understanding within the context of Canadian society.

Dialogical process

The other key factor to the development of a shared critical consciousness among the researchers, community collaborators, and the RAG members was the dialogical nature of our research. The RAG, researcher, community partner, and participant collaboration operated in a space that was responsive to the needs and feedback of those involved. As we understood each other and the research process as a dynamic phenomenon, we recognized that the findings of our research and the representations involved also carried these dynamic properties. We saw our experiences as a dialogical process comparable to that described by Frank (2005). Frank describes being ‘haunted and provoked’ by the writings of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (Frank, 2005). He notes that Bakhtin tells ‘a story within a story’. ‘He describes Devushkin, a character in one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early stories who has read Nikolai Gogol’s famous story ‘“The Overcoat”’ (Frank, 2005). Frank ‘recommends Bakhtin’s description of Devushkin’s feelings as providing a caution as to how social science should not leave its subjects feeling’ (Frank, 2005). As Bakhtin writes,

Devushkin had glimpsed himself in the image of the hero of ‘The Overcoat’, as something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail: all of you is here, there is nothing more in you, and nothing more to be said about you. He felt himself to be hopelessly predetermined and finished off, as if he were already dead, yet at the same time he sensed the falseness of such an approach. (Bakhtin, 1984: 58, as cited by Frank, 2005)

Frank appropriately names this practice as ‘devushkinizing the research participant’ and notes that the social research process always involves someone’s representation of another person or group (Frank, 2005). Dostoyevsky’s characters were dialogical in that they were defined by their ‘sense of their inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them’. Frank points to how Bakhtin describes Dostoyevsky’s heroes as ‘constantly engaged in furious battle with such definitions’ of themselves by other people. ‘In social science, researchers are these other people’. ‘Dostoevsky’s characters all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them’ (Frank, 2005). When conducting research and preparing the research report, Frank urges us to not take these representation as a ‘final statement of who the research participants are, but as one move in a continuing dialogue through which those participants will continue to form themselves, as they continue to become who they may yet be’ (Frank, 2005: 967).

Paulo Freire outlines a theory of dialogical action in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970). Freire describes that critical learning can be facilitated through a dialogical process that encourages an ‘epistemological curiosity’ for the learner (in our case for all involved). This dialogical process of communication aims to reveal truth through interactions with others and the world. Friere also acknowledges that there are dialogical processes that promote understanding and those nondialogical processes that reproduce power, deny dialogue, and distort communication (Freire, 1970).

In our research and in our descriptions earlier, we hope to capture a snapshot of some of the insights we gained in our collaborative process of developing a shared critical consciousness and endorse a dialogical process that engages the group members and the researchers. This process is also one that is situated and contingent and therefore can only be described as a moment in time or a cross section during the research that leaves the RAG members and the researchers as dynamic and continuing rather than being perceived as finalized through the research.

Conclusion: working effectively with RAGs

As community-based participatory research continues to work to generate knowledge in pursuit of social justice through collaboration and partnership, it is important that we remain open to the insights gained by all participants from all perspectives. The insights from this project offer some helpful recommendations for how community-based participatory projects can enhance their collaborations with RAGs:

Through our critical examination of contradictions and the understanding of broader social and political contexts, the knowledge generated by this project will be both relevant and accessible to policy makers, researchers, program developers, practitioners, and activists in the pursuit of social justice for racialized minority youth.