Guidelines and Categories for Classifying Participatory Research Projects in Health Promotion

This document, produced by the Institute of Health Research, Canada, outlines a set of guidelines for participatory research in health promotion. These guidelines are intended for use by grant application reviewers to appraise whether proposals for funding as participatory research meet participatory research criteria, but can also be used as a checklist by academic and community researchers in planning their projects. They represent a systematic attempt to make the principles and defining characteristics of participatory research explicit, and therefore observable and measurable. It should be noted that these guidelines will not necessarily be adopted by those who advocate a more unstructured form of participatory research. However, if participatory research is to be funded, it is necessary to make the essential components of the process transparent.

The document presents the guidelines and then outlines how they are to be used, including the assessment of content validity by external experts and by survey of participatory research practitioners. More details are available in the appendices attached to the document. The authors conclude that further work on the development, testing and application of the guidelines will strengthen their utility in supporting participatory research and its contribution to knowledge development in health promotion.

[adapted from author].