(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.