A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm

John Heron and Peter Reason (1997). Qualitative inquiry, 3 (3), 274-294. doi: 10.1177/107780049700300302

Deveoloping Guba and Lincoln (1994, Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N.
K. Denzin & Y S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research), the authors articulate a participatory paradigm by supporting Guba and Lincoln's argument that the constructivist paradigm is unclear about the relation between constructed realities and the original cosmos. In this light, the authors argued that "participative realities" are more useful.

The authors begin a paradigm building from the constructivist worldview. Further, it emphasizes human beings in relation to the living world and experiential knowledge, inquiry and reality. They argued:

"Constructivist views tend to be deficient in any acknowledgment of experiential knowing; that is, knowing by acquaintance, by meeting, and by felt participation in the presence of what is there. (p. 277)

For them, reality is a form of experience and experiential reality is both subjective and objective. For instance, holding someone's hand means that it shapes the person and simultaneously I meet the person. Thus, they stated, "To experience anything is to participate in it, and to participate is to both to mold and to encounter; hence, experiential reality is always subjective-objective" (p. 278). This participatory, subjective-objective, experiential reality constitutes the ontology of participatory worldview. Heron (1996 p, 11 ...) wrote:

It is subjective because it is only known through the form the mind gives it; and it is objective because the mind interpenetrates the given cosmos which it shapes. (p. 11)

Thus, in this paradigm, they argue that there is a primordial reality, in which the mind actively penetrates and cocreates reality through interaction with the cosmos.

Epistemology: the authors emphasize critical subjectivity as the epistemological ground. They acknowledge that knowing is from a perspective and that perspective has authentic values as well as restricting bias. Thus, what involves is critical subjectivity, such that a self-reflexive attention is given to the knower's ground. Developing the community consensus (which determines relative truth) of constructivism, the authors add shared experiential meaning to judge the relative truth. [THIS ARGUMENT IS VERY VAGUE.] In this light, they argued that critical subjectivity extends to critical intersubjectivity, for personal knowing is always set within cultural and experiential shared meaning.

Methodology: Collaborative/Cooperative forms of action inquiry.
The authors argued that cooperative inquiry rests on two participatory principles: epistemic participation and political participation:

The first means that any propositional knowledge that is the outcomes of the research is grounded by the researchers in their own experiential knowledge. The second means that research subjects have a basic human right to participate fully in designing the research that intends to gather knowledge about them. (p. 284)

The more participatory systematically the more cooperative. Thus, they distinguish this methodology from the mainstream qualitative paradigm:

Qualitative research about people is a halfway house between exclusive, controlling, quantitative, positivist research on people and fully participatory, cooperative research with people. (p. 285)

Cooperative inquiry is "a wide-ranging science about any aspect of the human condition that a group of coresearchers choose to explore through the instrumentality of their own experience" (p. 286).

Axiology: the authors contended that the omission of axiology in Guba and Lincoln's paradigm table is a critical deficit because axiology ultimately asks why we try to create reality and what it worthwhile and valuable. In this question, the authors respond that the participatory paradigm answers it is for human flourishing. It is practical knowing of "how to choose and act" (p. 287).