Deutscher Tropentag 2005 Stuttgart - Hohenheim , October 11 - 13 , 2005

1 Introduction Activities in and with groups are a central element of participatory research processes, particularly in the most popular approach, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Ideally a research team comprises people from various disciplines, of both sexes and of different cultural origins to avoid observer bias and to include diverse perspectives. As regards the methods used in PRAs, group exercises are given preference over interviews and discussions with individual respondents (e.g. Chambers, 1994). There has been a growing body of literature on the problems of working with groups of villagers, such as elite bias (e.g. Neef et al., 2003), the myth of community cohesion and of group homogeneity (e.g. Gujit and Shah (ed.), 1995) and vested interests among particular groups (e.g. Mosse, 2001). Much less attention has been given to group processes among the team of outsiders that enters the social field under study. There seems to be a widespread view that interdisciplinary and intercultural teams of researchers are driven by a common objective, empathy for local people and a joint vision of 'how things should be done' during the collaborative field research. The diversity of knowledge and experience that each members brings into the research activity is seen as a great opportunity to get a holistic perspective of local reality. Case studies presented in this paper, however, suggest that dynamics in the PRA teams can pose serious challenges for the research process and can jeopardize both the completion of its tasks and the intended democratic character of the participatory inquiry, particularly if group members come from different social worlds and professional practices and do not share the same disciplinary and epistemological background (cf. Ospina et al., 2004). 2 Material, methods and theoretical framework This paper draws on experiences with several participatory research activities in the context of a Collaborative Research Program entitled " Sustainable land use and rural development in mountainous regions of Southeast Asia ". The program consists of 16 subprojects covering several disciplines ranging from soil science, agronomy and animal husbandry to agricultural economics and rural sociology. My own subproject has the task to (1) support other subprojects in applying participatory methods in their research, and (2) to assess the potential and constraints of participatory approaches in agricultural research in the specific context of Thailand and Vietnam. The activities that I selected as cases for this paper were part of PRA trainings, pre-tests of selected participatory methods …