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, g...

the application of qualitative and participatory research methods in rural development studies shows similarities in findings with quantitative methods, as well as possibilities of more depth data analysis. this article is based on research carried out with rural appraisal method and participatory technique. the objective is to gather information on four major issues in women’s studies. the res...

Participatory sensing is an emerging paradigm in which citizens everywhere voluntarily use their computational devices to capture and share sensed data from their surrounding environments in order to monitor and analyze some phenomenon (e.g., weather, road traffic, pollution, etc.). Interest in participatory sensing systems has risen since a large mobile sensor network can now be opportunistica...

____________________________________________________________________ ii Chapter 1_____________________________________________________________________1 1. Towards Improving Representative Democracy in Canada _____________________________ 1 1.1. Defining Democracy: A “Dynamic Balance” ______________________________________________1 1.2. The Contemporary Model: Representative Democracy __________...

Participatory methods can, in principle, be applied for a variety of purposes to gain insight into the context of use of an artefact or the way in which tasks are performed by end users. Consequently, participatory methods are equally valid for problem identification, clarification of the issues relevant to a particular topic, but also for the detailed evaluation of devices, products and interf...

Evaluating participatory decision processes serves two key purposes: validating the usefulness of specific interventions for stakeholders, interveners and funders of conflict management processes, and improving practice. However, evaluation design remains challenging, partly because when attempting to serve both purposes we may end up serving neither well. In fact, the better we respond to one,...

In today’s network society policy analysis is more and more implemented by means of participatory approaches and methods. This is induced by the fact that power and knowledge are widely distributed among various groups of network actors (stakeholders). The network characteristics of our (western) societies (Castells, 1996) more or less force us to look at policy analysis from a more relativist ...

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) describes a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act. PRA has sources in activist participatory research, agroecosystem analysis, applied anthropology, field research on farming systems, and rapid rural appraisal (RRA). In RRA information is more el...

Can buzzwords be methodically exploited to develop more self-reflective and participatory research methods and practices within the ICT area? Research policies as well as research funding agencies rely heavily on buzzwords, yet tend to grow uncomfortable when these are deliberately highlighted and concatenated in research applications. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary R&D project in whi...

INTRODUCTION Community-based participatory research is a partnership approach to research that seeks to equally involve community members, organisational representatives and academic partners throughout the research process in a coequal and mutually beneficial partnership. To date, no published article has synthesised the best practices for community-based participatory research practices with ...