Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Participatory research (PR) is an approach to research where academic researchers work in equitable partnership with those effected by the issue being studied, or with those who must eventually use or act on the knowledge created. PR thus integrates the translation of research knowledge into action for change by engaging these end-users at the beginning of the knowledge-creation process. The action and change sought through PR is specifically intended to benefit its local stakeholders, yet findings must be able to be translated to other settings. The success of PR efforts in creating action for change relies heavily on the formal and informal interpersonal and inter-organisational relationships that develop among its stakeholders. These relationships form a social network, defined as the pattern of ties existing among a set of individuals, organisations or other social actors. An examination of this social network will thus give us insight into the process by which PR knowledge is translated into action for practice and policy change beyond the local context in which it was originally created and for which it was intended. Using the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, a long-standing community-based health promotion PR project, as a case study, this proposed study will use social network analysis techniques to describe the network of relationships among the various stakeholders (individual and organizational), and the importance of these relationships in the dissemination or uptake of research findings into policy and practice locally, to the wider Aboriginal community, and throughout Canada more generally. This will lead to a better understanding of how research results move into practice, and of how to best use stakeholder-engaged research such as PR, to bridge the often large gap between what we learn from research and what we do in practice.