Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) is a collaborative approach to research that involves all stakeholders throughout the research process, from establishing the research question, to developing data collection tools, to analysis and dissemination of findings. It is a research framework that aims to address the practical concerns of people in a community and fundamentally changes the roles of researcher and who is being researched. The CBPAR framework begins with a community’s issue, proposed action, or strategy and then supports or enhances this action with research that is community based and engaged. It frames research to be:

COMMUNITY BASED— grounded in the needs, issues, concerns, and strategies of communities and the com-munity-based organizations that serve them

PARTICIPATORY—directly engaging communities and community knowledge in the research process and its outcomes

ACTION BASED AND ORIENTED—supporting and/or enhancing the strategic action that leads to community transformation and social change

By its nature, CBPAR is applied research; it seeks to change issues that are critical to communities and focuses on engaging community members in research directed at addressing their social concerns. It is derived from several research approaches that are based on communities collaborating with researchers (ex. Community Based Research), or community members engaging in all aspects of the research process (ex. Participatory Action Research, or Action Research). As a frame-work for research conducted in, for, and by communities, CBPAR recognizes that:

++ Community knowledge is irreplaceable and provides key insights that ground-truths administrative data

++ Complex social issues often cannot be well understood or resolved by “expert” research

++ Interventions from outside of the community have often had disappointing results

++ Communities should have equal inclusion and collaboration in the identification, research, and resolution of community issues

++ There is value and legitimacy in the knowledge of individuals, families, and others in the community

CBPAR has a specific goal of collaborative research that engages stakeholders in an iterative research and action process. The diagram below shows that CBPAR links research and action, recognizing that social action requires further research and social research requires further action.