Chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, are more prevalent in low-income and minority communities. One promising method to understand and address these chronic conditions is through Community Based Participato...Chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, are more prevalent in low-income and minority communities. One promising method to understand and address these chronic conditions is through Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). CBPR engages and empowers community members to identify risk factors and work toward solutions as equal partners with researchers. One positive and lasting outcome may be an increase in the community capacity which includes individual and community leadership development, policy making, creating connections and utilizing existing community resources. Evaluating community capacity created as a result of a CBPR project is one way to measure its effectiveness. This paper is a retrospective analysis of the capacity built during a CBPR study of diabetes and obesity in East and South Los Angeles which are two low-income and minority neighborhoods. Four people, who were heavily involved in the project, completed a retrospective analysis of the capacity built utilizing a validated instrument. There was consensus about the capacity built, which included: excellent participation by community members, inclusion of members’ ideas to leverage additional funding, and pride of community members in their participation in the project. One area that could have been strengthened was increased access for leadership and research experience among community members, especially since the project ended prematurely. There were differences among the two community groups with East Los Angeles members focusing more on tangible interventions and grant writing, while South Los Angeles members had a greater policy focus. Communities and researchers who are embarking on a CBPR project can learn from those who have implemented the strategy. Measuring capacity built during and after the project, can be one way to understanding the contributions of a project in a community. CBPR is an empowering research methodology which, done correctly, can build community capacity and have long-term impacts on individuals and communities.展开更多
Participatory and integrated research approaches employed by a long-term Thai- Vietnamese-German collaborative research program, ‘The Uplands Program’, that address the vicious circles of resource scarcity, environm...Participatory and integrated research approaches employed by a long-term Thai- Vietnamese-German collaborative research program, ‘The Uplands Program’, that address the vicious circles of resource scarcity, environmental degrada- tion and rural poverty in mountainous regions of northern Thailand and northern Vietnam are discussed in this paper. We present two examples from the Thai component of the research program to show how different disciplines and stakeholders need to cooperate at different scales to make meaningful scientific contributions towards sustainable land use and rural development in mountainous regions. The case of resource conservation in the Thai highlands shows that local and scientific knowledge, conven- tional surveys and participatory modeling can be creatively combined. Integrated research on the potential of integrating fruit trees and associated technologies into mountain farming systems suggests that natural scientists have to work alongsideeconomists and social scientists to avoid harmful effects of purely technology-driven and productivity- enhancing approaches. The success of new technologies cannot be measured solely by adoption rates and yield increases, but also needs to take into account their long-term impact on various groups of farmers and the ecological, economic and social trade-offs that they entail. Technical and institutional innovations need to go hand in hand to provide viable livelihood opportunities for smallholder farmers in mountain watersheds. The major lesson learned from the first six years of our research in the mountains of Thailand and Vietnam is that conventional and participatory approaches are not antagonistic; if scientists from various disciplines and research paradigms are open-minded, the combination of both approaches can produce meaningful results that cater for the needs of both the academic community and local stakeholders in mountain environments.展开更多
This paper discusses participatory research in the Andes and presents a case study in Cotacachi, Ecuador, where sustainability scientists and indigenous people seek common ground in their respective but drastically di...This paper discusses participatory research in the Andes and presents a case study in Cotacachi, Ecuador, where sustainability scientists and indigenous people seek common ground in their respective but drastically different research and social agendas. Participatory research based on Andean experiences pre-dated and inspired much of the later international movement in agriculture, health, and conservation. Andean communities have a long history in demanding that outsiders address the needs of the community as a condition for carrying out scientific or applied activities. What an Andean community, however, sees as relevant may or may not be within the rubric of ‘participatory research’ as it is practiced throughout much of the world. In fact, overzealous participatory researchers are just as bothersome as their predecessors bearing long questionnaires. More important to Andean people is an equitable relationship with researchers and developers in which exchanges of value are made. A distinction between ‘enriching’ and ‘extractive’ research is drawn. In the case of the SANREM project in Cotacachi, Ecuador, scientists carried out enriching research activities of interest to local people as a wayto generate social capital for conducting basic research which does not have an obvious, immediate local benefit. The requested research did not have a conventional participatory methodology but provided valuable products (educational opportunity, germplasm, community visualization tools, and information) to the indigenous community in exchange for time and resources to conduct research on more basic natural resource questions. We argue that in the Andean context the key to reconciling the needs of scientists and of local needs is seeking new forms of equitable collaboration which reach beyond the present and now somewhat tired discourse of ‘participation’.展开更多
This paper argues that contextual constraints can significantly interfere with the conduct of research and development, and accordingly should be analyzed more honestly. It describes a five country research project, L...This paper argues that contextual constraints can significantly interfere with the conduct of research and development, and accordingly should be analyzed more honestly. It describes a five country research project, Landscape Mosaics, in which participatory action research （PAR） was intended as one of two central approaches in the original research design （the other approach being more conventional research）. The five sites, in Cameroon, Indonesia, Laos, Madagascar, and Tanzania, are described, with an emphasis on their implementation of PAR. The fact that personnel and partners on three of the five sites failed to implement PAR is analyzed, to determine the constraints to such action. These findings are then compared with our experience with two other similar projects in which PAR was more widely implemented. We conclude by identifying the most important constraints to be overcome in implementing a PAR process, something we consider important in efforts to deal with change processes in developing countries.展开更多
Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environmental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics, overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically l...Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environmental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics, overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically link environmental burden (EB) and social disparity (SD) data. Visually representing EB and SD data concretizes the unjust distributions of environmental and broader inequitable societal policies. These maps can be used to efficaciously assess EJ disparities created by such policies through exploring socioeconomic characteristics with local communities. Given the great variation in how GIS EJ applications measure and visualize EB and SD, we present a community-based participatory design (CBPD) lens to collaboratively work across overburdened communities and support making EJ data accessible to all stakeholders. Our location proximity approach is a powerful way to assess overburdened EJ communities because it relies on user-predefined boundaries, and it doesn’t use a single fixed unit of reference to prioritize areas of intervention. Moreover, most areal unit applications use ordinal measures, such as percentiles, and multidimensional indexes, which are intelligible to understand by many residents. Leveraging a community-based participatory design methodology, we present our novel Proximity to Hazards Dashboard (PHD) that includes data on asphalt plants and industrial corridors, hazards often missing from state-level dashboards but very relevant for city policymaking, as well as more traditionally used environmental hazard sources. The use of the tool by policymakers and community members suggests that EJ categorization should focus less on procedural benchmarks and more on systemic change for policy impacts in ways that sustain the participatory nature of our approach.展开更多
When contributing to participatory research, farmers usually appreciate the performance of cowpea varieties using qualitative scores. The score they attribute to each variety are based on local knowledge. The specific...When contributing to participatory research, farmers usually appreciate the performance of cowpea varieties using qualitative scores. The score they attribute to each variety are based on local knowledge. The specific criteria they individually use to attribute a score are not well described. The objectives of this work were to: 1) identify and describe exhaustively the local criteria used by farmers to measure the agronomic performance of cowpea;2) assess the variability and statistical structure of these farmer criteria across local contexts;3) and analyze the association between these farmer criteria and the classical agronomic measurement. To achieve these objectives, an augmented block design was implemented across fifteen locations in the regions of Maradi, Dosso and Tillabéri, representing a diversity of local contexts. From a set of 36 cowpea varieties, fifteen varieties were sown per location, including five varieties (controls) common to all locations. In each location, two replicates were sown in randomized Fisher’s blocks. After agronomic measurement and participatory evaluation (scoring of varieties by farmers), a group survey (focus group) was conducted in each location to identify the criteria considered by farmers to found their discretional scoring of varieties during the participatory evaluation. The analysis of the data identified, across locations, thirteen criteria defined by farmers to characterize the agronomic performance of cowpea. Some of these criteria were different according to location. Farmers ranked the three varieties with the best performance for each agronomical trait (Top 3 varieties). A comparison of the farmer ranking with the ranking based on agronomic measurements revealed similarity and complementary between both methods. This study highlighted the importance of considering both local and scientific knowledge in local varietal evaluations.展开更多
Purpose: To investigate the effect of nutrition education and the engagement of students, parents and teachers in addressing school-specific environmental influences in eating problem. Design: This study adopted the a...Purpose: To investigate the effect of nutrition education and the engagement of students, parents and teachers in addressing school-specific environmental influences in eating problem. Design: This study adopted the action research process of diagnosing, action planning, taking action, evaluating, and specifying learning. Each of obese and non-obese male and female students was randomly selected based on physical screening based on obesity criteria. Dietary intake records were taken over seven days as the pre-intervention period. These four students, one of each of their parents and the teacher from the primary school, were given 3 sessions of nutrition education. After the nutrition education, dietary intake records were taken over the subsequent 7 days as the post-intervention period. Lunch observation and lunch menu review were included to identify eating problem of primary school children in school level. Findings: Students were found to consume less whole grains and more food items belonged to the “limited” and “strongly discouraged” as set in government lunch guidelines. Students’ dietary intakes before and after the nutrition education were found improved in their energy intake (p = 0.012), total fat, saturated fat, calcium, sodium, and cholesterol. Conclusion: A participatory model in elementary nutrition education could be effective.展开更多
The utilization of mobile and web applications has surpassed all other platforms in terms of disseminating researchers’ knowledge among diverse communities throughout the world. The current method of disseminating re...The utilization of mobile and web applications has surpassed all other platforms in terms of disseminating researchers’ knowledge among diverse communities throughout the world. The current method of disseminating researchers’ knowledge to the communities in the Arusha region in Tanzania is through meetings, workshops, and focus group discussions held by researchers, agricultural extension officers and community members after every three months or during field study. Yet the strategy is inefficient and ineffective in practice. The purpose of this study was to determine the most efficient and successful method of disseminating knowledge in communities. The study began with a qualitative phase, utilizing an interpretive technique and a qualitative multiple case study research design. The Arusha region in Tanzania was selected as a case study where different social activities were undertaken, including farming, livestock keeping, tourism activities and fishing. Individual participants were interviewed by using a semi-structured questionnaire. In addition, focus group discussions were conducted to gather more information regarding the needs of the mobile application. Through the implementation of the application, the second phase of the study led to the development of a mobile application that includes community members, agricultural extension officers, and researchers that will enable anyone to install the application on their mobile phones to access knowledge regarding activities undertaken in Arusha. According to the findings of the first phase of the research, a substantial percentage of community members own mobile phones, and hence a mobile application would be sufficient. The research also found that most researcher-community interactions occur at the data collection and intervention assessment (field trials) stages. Hence, the mobile application will benefit community members, district agricultural, irrigation, and cooperative officers (DAICO), and researchers.展开更多
文摘Chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, are more prevalent in low-income and minority communities. One promising method to understand and address these chronic conditions is through Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). CBPR engages and empowers community members to identify risk factors and work toward solutions as equal partners with researchers. One positive and lasting outcome may be an increase in the community capacity which includes individual and community leadership development, policy making, creating connections and utilizing existing community resources. Evaluating community capacity created as a result of a CBPR project is one way to measure its effectiveness. This paper is a retrospective analysis of the capacity built during a CBPR study of diabetes and obesity in East and South Los Angeles which are two low-income and minority neighborhoods. Four people, who were heavily involved in the project, completed a retrospective analysis of the capacity built utilizing a validated instrument. There was consensus about the capacity built, which included: excellent participation by community members, inclusion of members’ ideas to leverage additional funding, and pride of community members in their participation in the project. One area that could have been strengthened was increased access for leadership and research experience among community members, especially since the project ended prematurely. There were differences among the two community groups with East Los Angeles members focusing more on tangible interventions and grant writing, while South Los Angeles members had a greater policy focus. Communities and researchers who are embarking on a CBPR project can learn from those who have implemented the strategy. Measuring capacity built during and after the project, can be one way to understanding the contributions of a project in a community. CBPR is an empowering research methodology which, done correctly, can build community capacity and have long-term impacts on individuals and communities.
文摘Participatory and integrated research approaches employed by a long-term Thai- Vietnamese-German collaborative research program, ‘The Uplands Program’, that address the vicious circles of resource scarcity, environmental degrada- tion and rural poverty in mountainous regions of northern Thailand and northern Vietnam are discussed in this paper. We present two examples from the Thai component of the research program to show how different disciplines and stakeholders need to cooperate at different scales to make meaningful scientific contributions towards sustainable land use and rural development in mountainous regions. The case of resource conservation in the Thai highlands shows that local and scientific knowledge, conven- tional surveys and participatory modeling can be creatively combined. Integrated research on the potential of integrating fruit trees and associated technologies into mountain farming systems suggests that natural scientists have to work alongsideeconomists and social scientists to avoid harmful effects of purely technology-driven and productivity- enhancing approaches. The success of new technologies cannot be measured solely by adoption rates and yield increases, but also needs to take into account their long-term impact on various groups of farmers and the ecological, economic and social trade-offs that they entail. Technical and institutional innovations need to go hand in hand to provide viable livelihood opportunities for smallholder farmers in mountain watersheds. The major lesson learned from the first six years of our research in the mountains of Thailand and Vietnam is that conventional and participatory approaches are not antagonistic; if scientists from various disciplines and research paradigms are open-minded, the combination of both approaches can produce meaningful results that cater for the needs of both the academic community and local stakeholders in mountain environments.
文摘This paper discusses participatory research in the Andes and presents a case study in Cotacachi, Ecuador, where sustainability scientists and indigenous people seek common ground in their respective but drastically different research and social agendas. Participatory research based on Andean experiences pre-dated and inspired much of the later international movement in agriculture, health, and conservation. Andean communities have a long history in demanding that outsiders address the needs of the community as a condition for carrying out scientific or applied activities. What an Andean community, however, sees as relevant may or may not be within the rubric of ‘participatory research’ as it is practiced throughout much of the world. In fact, overzealous participatory researchers are just as bothersome as their predecessors bearing long questionnaires. More important to Andean people is an equitable relationship with researchers and developers in which exchanges of value are made. A distinction between ‘enriching’ and ‘extractive’ research is drawn. In the case of the SANREM project in Cotacachi, Ecuador, scientists carried out enriching research activities of interest to local people as a wayto generate social capital for conducting basic research which does not have an obvious, immediate local benefit. The requested research did not have a conventional participatory methodology but provided valuable products (educational opportunity, germplasm, community visualization tools, and information) to the indigenous community in exchange for time and resources to conduct research on more basic natural resource questions. We argue that in the Andean context the key to reconciling the needs of scientists and of local needs is seeking new forms of equitable collaboration which reach beyond the present and now somewhat tired discourse of ‘participation’.
文摘This paper argues that contextual constraints can significantly interfere with the conduct of research and development, and accordingly should be analyzed more honestly. It describes a five country research project, Landscape Mosaics, in which participatory action research （PAR） was intended as one of two central approaches in the original research design （the other approach being more conventional research）. The five sites, in Cameroon, Indonesia, Laos, Madagascar, and Tanzania, are described, with an emphasis on their implementation of PAR. The fact that personnel and partners on three of the five sites failed to implement PAR is analyzed, to determine the constraints to such action. These findings are then compared with our experience with two other similar projects in which PAR was more widely implemented. We conclude by identifying the most important constraints to be overcome in implementing a PAR process, something we consider important in efforts to deal with change processes in developing countries.
文摘Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environmental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics, overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically link environmental burden (EB) and social disparity (SD) data. Visually representing EB and SD data concretizes the unjust distributions of environmental and broader inequitable societal policies. These maps can be used to efficaciously assess EJ disparities created by such policies through exploring socioeconomic characteristics with local communities. Given the great variation in how GIS EJ applications measure and visualize EB and SD, we present a community-based participatory design (CBPD) lens to collaboratively work across overburdened communities and support making EJ data accessible to all stakeholders. Our location proximity approach is a powerful way to assess overburdened EJ communities because it relies on user-predefined boundaries, and it doesn’t use a single fixed unit of reference to prioritize areas of intervention. Moreover, most areal unit applications use ordinal measures, such as percentiles, and multidimensional indexes, which are intelligible to understand by many residents. Leveraging a community-based participatory design methodology, we present our novel Proximity to Hazards Dashboard (PHD) that includes data on asphalt plants and industrial corridors, hazards often missing from state-level dashboards but very relevant for city policymaking, as well as more traditionally used environmental hazard sources. The use of the tool by policymakers and community members suggests that EJ categorization should focus less on procedural benchmarks and more on systemic change for policy impacts in ways that sustain the participatory nature of our approach.
文摘When contributing to participatory research, farmers usually appreciate the performance of cowpea varieties using qualitative scores. The score they attribute to each variety are based on local knowledge. The specific criteria they individually use to attribute a score are not well described. The objectives of this work were to: 1) identify and describe exhaustively the local criteria used by farmers to measure the agronomic performance of cowpea;2) assess the variability and statistical structure of these farmer criteria across local contexts;3) and analyze the association between these farmer criteria and the classical agronomic measurement. To achieve these objectives, an augmented block design was implemented across fifteen locations in the regions of Maradi, Dosso and Tillabéri, representing a diversity of local contexts. From a set of 36 cowpea varieties, fifteen varieties were sown per location, including five varieties (controls) common to all locations. In each location, two replicates were sown in randomized Fisher’s blocks. After agronomic measurement and participatory evaluation (scoring of varieties by farmers), a group survey (focus group) was conducted in each location to identify the criteria considered by farmers to found their discretional scoring of varieties during the participatory evaluation. The analysis of the data identified, across locations, thirteen criteria defined by farmers to characterize the agronomic performance of cowpea. Some of these criteria were different according to location. Farmers ranked the three varieties with the best performance for each agronomical trait (Top 3 varieties). A comparison of the farmer ranking with the ranking based on agronomic measurements revealed similarity and complementary between both methods. This study highlighted the importance of considering both local and scientific knowledge in local varietal evaluations.
文摘Purpose: To investigate the effect of nutrition education and the engagement of students, parents and teachers in addressing school-specific environmental influences in eating problem. Design: This study adopted the action research process of diagnosing, action planning, taking action, evaluating, and specifying learning. Each of obese and non-obese male and female students was randomly selected based on physical screening based on obesity criteria. Dietary intake records were taken over seven days as the pre-intervention period. These four students, one of each of their parents and the teacher from the primary school, were given 3 sessions of nutrition education. After the nutrition education, dietary intake records were taken over the subsequent 7 days as the post-intervention period. Lunch observation and lunch menu review were included to identify eating problem of primary school children in school level. Findings: Students were found to consume less whole grains and more food items belonged to the “limited” and “strongly discouraged” as set in government lunch guidelines. Students’ dietary intakes before and after the nutrition education were found improved in their energy intake (p = 0.012), total fat, saturated fat, calcium, sodium, and cholesterol. Conclusion: A participatory model in elementary nutrition education could be effective.
文摘The utilization of mobile and web applications has surpassed all other platforms in terms of disseminating researchers’ knowledge among diverse communities throughout the world. The current method of disseminating researchers’ knowledge to the communities in the Arusha region in Tanzania is through meetings, workshops, and focus group discussions held by researchers, agricultural extension officers and community members after every three months or during field study. Yet the strategy is inefficient and ineffective in practice. The purpose of this study was to determine the most efficient and successful method of disseminating knowledge in communities. The study began with a qualitative phase, utilizing an interpretive technique and a qualitative multiple case study research design. The Arusha region in Tanzania was selected as a case study where different social activities were undertaken, including farming, livestock keeping, tourism activities and fishing. Individual participants were interviewed by using a semi-structured questionnaire. In addition, focus group discussions were conducted to gather more information regarding the needs of the mobile application. Through the implementation of the application, the second phase of the study led to the development of a mobile application that includes community members, agricultural extension officers, and researchers that will enable anyone to install the application on their mobile phones to access knowledge regarding activities undertaken in Arusha. According to the findings of the first phase of the research, a substantial percentage of community members own mobile phones, and hence a mobile application would be sufficient. The research also found that most researcher-community interactions occur at the data collection and intervention assessment (field trials) stages. Hence, the mobile application will benefit community members, district agricultural, irrigation, and cooperative officers (DAICO), and researchers.
