Engaging interdisciplinary service providers to enhance collaboration to support refugee families whose children have special health care needs

Conducting Community Based Participatory Action Research

“…In contrast, CBPAR is an approach in which community members become members of the research team; and their knowledge (rather than the objectivist knowledge of experts) is epistemologically valued becomes it is grounded and emerges from the social reality of the community or organization under investigation (Fine, 2008). While debate about academic privilege, the emancipatory claims of CBPAR, and the power dynamics between and among academics and community actors does exist (Janes, 2016), several CBPAR projects have demonstrated that participatory methods can help community actors inform and participate in the conduct of research that is grounded within the social realities and needs or their own community (Kervick et al, 2021;Lobb et al, 2018;Ritchie et al, 2010). Whereas the power asymmetries of traditional research tend to delegitimatize other cultural ways of knowing, CBPAR can be used to decolonize research, and to ask questions about whether the knowledge produced was just or would create more harm than good.…”