What is Action Research?

Foundations and Theory
Action research is not just a set of methods, but a philosophical and political orientation that challenges the traditional paradigm of positivist science. It seeks to break the dichotomy between the “subject who knows” (academic researcher) and the “object to be known” (community), transforming the production of knowledge into a collective and emancipatory act.

The Levels of Participation: The “Ladder” of Research
Participation is not a binary concept. It occurs in different degrees of intensity and decision-making power. Based on classic models, such as that of Sherry Arnstein, action research seeks to achieve the highest levels of engagement.

Follow the steps in an increasing degree of participation:

1. Nominal Participation/Information: the community is only informed about the research or provides data without influencing the study design.
2. Consultation: researchers seek opinions from the community, but retain all decision-making power over what will be done with the information.
3. Collaboration: there is a real partnership where the community influences specific parts of the process, such as data collection.
4. Community Control/Co-creation: the level sought by participatory research, where the community and academic researchers share decision-making power at all stages — from problem definition to analysis and dissemination of results.

Action research aims for the highest level of engagement and participation, ensuring participation and co-creation with community researchers at all stages.

Criteria for Participatory Community Research

Barbara Israel and collaborators defined the fundamental principles that characterize research as genuinely community-based. These criteria serve as an “ethical guide” for researchers:

• The community as a unit of identity: recognize and strengthen geographic, cultural and common interest ties.
• Focus on assets and strengths: identify the resources and skills that already exist in the territory, instead of focusing only on needs.
• Equitable partnership/horizontality: involve community members in all phases of research, promoting a real transfer of power and knowledge.
• Integration between knowledge and action: the ultimate goal is not just to publish an article, but to generate concrete social changes.
• Processo cíclico e interativo: a pesquisa é um ciclo contínuo de planejar, agir, observar e refletir.
• Dissemination to all: results must be returned to the community in accessible language and credit (co-authorship) must be shared.

Theoretical and Epistemological Pillars

The “Feeling” Subject (Orlando Fals Borda)
The method used in the research, created by Fals Borda, is Participatory Action-Research (IAP) and is based on the premise that knowledge is constructed by integral human beings, who do not separate reason from feeling. The researcher is a “being in the world”, with ethical and political commitment.

Knowledge sharing (Paulo Freire)
Following Paulo Freire's method, “where those who teach learn by teaching and those who learn teach by learning”, we seek the collective construction of knowledge that brings together academic knowledge and popular knowledge in a horizontal relationship between professional and community researchers.

Epistemologies of the South and Decoloniality
The research proposes a “decolonial turn”, questioning the silencing of the wisdom of the Global South by a Eurocentric science, seeking to combat “epistemicide” — the destruction of traditional and ancestral knowledge — through the valorization of popular wisdom.

Intersectionality and intersectionality
The methodology requires an analysis of the multiple layers of oppression that permeate subjects, including race, gender, class and sexuality, as social determinants of health and the production of knowledge. It takes advantage of all the resources available in the territory, in addition to the health and mental health fields.

Phenomenology of Frantz Fanon
The research is based on the phenomenology of Frantz Fanon, articulating with other thinkers from the Southern continents, to understand mental suffering and its consequences within a sociogenic perspective in which the history of colonial oppression and its re-actualization through the coloniality of power and knowledge leave deep marks on the souls of colonized subjects and are organized in languages that impact subjective and political processes, perpetuating suffering and oppression.

Methodological Cycle - Entrepares Network

Unlike linear research, participatory action research operates in a spiral: