“Big Organisations” Supporting “Small Involvement”: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina on Enabling Community‐Based Participation of Children Through PAR

Abstract

The article presents the process and the outcomes of child participatory action research (PAR) conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as part of UNICEF activities in this country. The study was implemented through children acting as co-researchers, organised in so-called Children's PAR Groups, initiated in three BiH municipalities. Children collaborated with a Support Group in each of the municipalities, comprised of adults who helped children implement their activities. Children chose to focus their research on community participation and ensured a number of outcomes in a relatively brief period. The value of PAR in the development of child participation was highlighted by children and adults who took part in the study. Prejudices that children have toward adults, and vice versa, were issues identified as main barriers for wider children's participation. This article also reviews a number of ethical challenges highlighted in the study, such as the organisational barriers to children's participation and project-based support for its development.

A scoping review: The utility of participatory research approaches in psychology

“…Still, some researchers offered interesting examples of working with participants to disseminate findings and mobilize others into action. For example, youth researchers supported youth participants in: lobbying municipal agencies (e.g., boards of education; Lind, ; Maglajlic, ); disseminating their findings through animated films presented to local services and used in educational settings (Taggart et al, ); and developing project websites (Flicker et al, ). Importantly, in the last example, to compete with the marginalization that these youth often felt, and to communicate the value of their input, they were provided with honoraria for participation.…”

“…Industrial/organizational research also engaged participants in recruitment, such as by involving participating workers in hosting workshops (Beardwood et al, 2005) or focus groups (Oades, Law, & Marshall, 2011) for other workers, and using participants to establish contact with other potential participants (Bridges & Meyer, 2007). Similarly, some researchers (e.g., Guishard et al, 2005;Levac, 2013;Maglajlic, 2010;Mooney-Somers et al, 2015;Puig, Erwin, Evenson, & Beresford, 2015;Wershler & Ronis, 2015) described training youth to recruit other youth who then conducted interviews with their peers. In general, working with youth-serving or youth-focused community organizations was a commonly described strategy for recruiting adolescent research participants.…”

Imagining Participatory Action Research in Collaboration with Children: an Introduction

“…Also, PAR is represented in many places around the world, allowing readers to examine how PAR is situated in and across several countries. Outside of the US, these places include Sub-Saharan Africa (Porter et al 2010), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Maglajlic 2010), Canada (Liegghio et al 2010), and the UK (Clark 2010;Kellett 2010). This diversity allows for rich comparisons with respect to methods, age of children, social and cultural contexts, and settings where the research is conducted.…”

“…With these context-dependent ideas in mind, the focus is on best processes, or what processes should be followed to enact a contextually and culturally appropriate intervention. The Maglajlic (2010) contribution takes this perspective by arguing against a common way to conduct PAR across several research settings in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She offers a timely critique of international models of community development as children in three different regions ask one another what they want from their communities and share what they learn about participation in community life with adults.…”

“…With respect to social change, PAR can be viewed as altering a setting, a policy, social geography, or relationships and roles. Examples in this special issue include attempts to change schools (Duckett et al 2010;Newman Phillips et al this issue), playgrounds (Ren and Langhout 2010), after-school programs (Chen et al 2010), how municipalities function (Maglajlic 2010), mental health care systems (Liegghio et al 2010), and transportation policies (Porter et al 2010). One notable point regarding the varied research programs that these papers represent is that many of these activities are aimed at change on more than one level of analysis; by examining a different set of the data from the same project, the same project at a different point in time, or the data in a different way, changes at other levels of analysis could be highlighted.…”