(2) The CBR in Practice

The How About of… A New Breed of Research Category


Community-based Research (CBR)

(2) The CBR in Practice

CBR by its name implies that activities happen within a specific area where people live their lives and /or problems arise, that’s why sometimes it’s called – Area-based Research and Development.

By the way, some hard-core academicians / researchers cast their doubt upon CBR; should it be or not be accepted as a research category; some accept at most as a case study or the like. Any way, what should be done most in this situation is to look closely into the “how it gets done” of CBR…

Apart from the studies released lately by some prominent academicians / researchers that indicate interesting assumptions concerning CBR practice during the past decade, another way is to dig deeper into reality - the way CBR task’s been carried out in the field – the followings are some of what we’ll find…

(1) The Three-Party Collaboration: there are (a) key persons in the community, (b) the academicians from faculties / university around the area (called later the Facilitator), together with (c) local government officials (sometimes this group are community’s stakeholders); these three groups work in collaboration with each other in order to come up with (a) a set of Rationality which describes the sources of problems and relevant technical background knowledge, including (b) a well prepared Thesis / Research Statement which clearly indicates the objectives of the CBR project, and (c) a research design & methodology.

(2) Knowledge Management (KM) & Layman as Researcher: there are several Special People Conferences where villagers / community members, the area’s key figures, the elderly including monks and teachers join in activities like brain storming sessions on various topics ranging from… how or where the problems happen to... the ways to solve them; this is what it’s called KM process. Then community key persons, together with a group of professional researchers / academicians or the Facilitator, organize & train selected or volunteer members or the Research Team to conduct their designated task.

(3) Data & Information Feed-back: this is one of the Mechanisms initiated in the process of analyzing and synthesizing data / info that has been collected; and this process might be conducted times & again during the course of research work so that the Research Team itself would be able to get the “Big Picture” and could find the way out or the solution of the work more clearly and easily.

When the work gets done the problem has been solved the community gets a veteran Research Team with more experience and tacit knowledge which means that these groups of people have stronger potentiality ready to carry out more difficult task in the future by themselves.

These are some of the CBR practices in reality.

Key words here are: Facilitator, Key Person, Government Official, Stakeholder, Research Team, Special People Conference, Info Feed-back, and Big Picture.

The How About of... A New Breed Research Category

Community-based Research (CBR)

{This article bases its main ideas on the study on the same subject by Dr. Karnjana Keawthep (2009); and Dr. Banchorn Keawsong (2009)}

(1) How comes the CBR?

It is said that this New Breed is actually the research for People’s Emancipation!

It unlocks some important prerequisites of the conventional research methodologies…

And it emphasizes the applicability of each research finding…

Importantly one of its objectives is to transform laymen into Community Researchers, who finally would carry on the task to emancipate their own community from ignorance & poverty!

Conventional research as all research literacy already know, by names such as Theoretical research, Empirical research, Action research, Participatory – Action – Research or PAR etc., and by their procedural methodologies known such as… the development of the rationality or/and thesis statement… research design, and… data collecting & analyzing methods to come up with either qualitative or quantitative findings or in both ways.

However, as most of us also know, a new kind of research emerges or being revived all the time, like PAR which has its prominent asset of inclusive action into a normal research procedures, together with a lot of other kinds of research had just come into existence during mid 20th century. CBR itself started during late 20th century and became well known in early 21st century and gradually consolidating into a new breed in research world since then.

Community-based Research or CBR has it own Roots, Attributes and special Methodology; where it still retains some necessary / significant procedures which belong to conventional research, though.

The Roots: CBR stems from 3 important Roots:

(1) Technical procedures, eg., using Knowledge Management (KM) in place of Literature Review, by means of brain storming on topic concerning community problems among key figures in the community, known as – Learning Stage & Floor Seminar including Focus Group Discussion or Planned meeting.

(2) People & community Development, eg., using people participation process in identifying their own problems and ways or projects for solving those problems, known as – Planned Change.

(3) Layman Approaches, eg., due to its most important objective is to transform laymen themselves into community’s researchers, CBR methodologies, even though it still accepts and applies some necessary conventional research methodologies, those often are in some degrees simplified or some are newly created mechanisms; also the expected outcomes or research findings are mostly real, down-to-earth applicable for solving real problems exist in the community, which are a prove of success of this research project.

In The next “How About…” will deal with the wonderful Attributes of CBR and others.

Until then

Goodbye for now!