Researching with: A Decolonizing Approach to Community-Based Action Research

Many community health interventions fail, wasting tax dollars and human resources. These interventions are typically designed by subject matter experts who don’t have direct experience with the local community. In contrast, successful interventions are built from the ground up, planned and implemented by the people that will benefit from them, using community-based action research. Researching With: A Decolonizing Approach to Community-Based Action Research is a guide for how to do research that is inclusive, engages in community-building, and implements a decolonizing framework. This text advocates for a collaborative approach, researching with communities, rather than conducting research on them. Reviewing both theory and method, Jessica Smartt Gullion and Abigail Tilton offer practical tips for forming community partnerships and building coalitions. Researching With also includes helpful information about incorporating community work into a successful academic career. This book can be used as supplemental or primary reading in courses in sociology, social work, health research, nursing, public health, qualitative inquiry, and research methods, and is also of value to individual researchers and graduate students writing their thesis.

Jessica Smartt Gullion, PhD (2002), Texas Woman’s University, is Associate Dean of Research for the College of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas Woman’s University. She has written extensively on community health and ethnography. Her most recent books include Diffractive Ethnography: Social Science and the Ontological Turn (Routledge, 2018) and Writing Ethnography (Sense Publishers, 2015).
Abigail Tilton, PhD (2006), University of North Texas, is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Social Work at Texas Woman’s University. Her research interests include child and family welfare, foster care, and women’s leadership development.