1. Community-Based Participant-Observation (CBPO): A Participatory Method for Ethnographic Research
- Author
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Anais Roque, Amber Wutich, Alexandra Brewis, Melissa Beresford, Laura Landes, Olga Morales-Pate, Ramon Lucero, Wendy Jepson, Yushiou Tsai, and Michael Hanemann
- Abstract
Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community-based participatory research have different scholarly origins and norms but are united in centering communities' understandings on their terms. Combining the strengths of both, we provide a step-by-step explanation of community-based participant-observation, with examples from a study of water insecurity in colonias north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Using community-based participant-observation, researchers can facilitate the co-production of knowledge and community benefit by analyzing high-quality data that inform theory building and basic research. [The authors acknowledge the co-authorship of the Action for Water Equity Consortium.]
- Published
- 2024
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