Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Oct 10;12(1):119.
doi: 10.1186/s13012-017-0648-y.

Organizational participatory research: a systematic mixed studies review exposing its extra benefits and the key factors associated with them

Paula L Bush  1 , Pierre Pluye  2 , Christine Loignon  3 , Vera Granikov  2 , Michael T Wright  4 , Jean-François Pelletier  5 , Gillian Bartlett-Esquilant  2 , Ann C Macaulay  6 , Jeannie Haggerty  2 , Sharon Parry  7 , Carol Repchinsky  8
Affiliations

Organizational participatory research: a systematic mixed studies review exposing its extra benefits and the key factors associated with them

Paula L Bush et al. Implement Sci. .

Abstract

Background: In health, organizational participatory research (OPR) refers to health organization members participating in research decisions, with university researchers, throughout a study. This non-academic partner contribution to the research may take the form of consultation or co-construction. A drawback of OPR is that it requires more time from all those involved, compared to non-participatory research approaches; thus, understanding the added value of OPR, if any, is important. Thus, we sought to assess whether the OPR approach leads to benefits beyond what could be achieved through traditional research.

Methods: We identified, selected, and appraised OPR health literature, and at each stage, two team members independently reviewed and coded the literature. We used quantitative content analysis to transform textual data into reliable numerical codes and conducted a logistic regression to test the hypothesis that a co-construction type OPR study yields extra benefits with a greater likelihood than consultation-type OPR studies.

Results: From 8873 abstracts and 992 full text papers, we distilled a sample of 107 OPR studies. We found no difference between the type of organization members' participation and the likelihood of exhibiting an extra benefit. However, the likelihood of an OPR study exhibiting at least one extra benefit is quadrupled when the impetus for the study comes from the organization, rather than the university researcher(s), or the organization and the university researcher(s) together (OR = 4.11, CI = 1.12-14.01). We also defined five types of extra benefits.

Conclusions: This review describes the types of extra benefits OPR can yield and suggests these benefits may occur if the organization initiates the OPR. Further, this review exposes a need for OPR authors to more clearly describe the type of non-academic partner participation in key research decisions throughout the study. Detailed descriptions will benefit others conducting OPR and allow for a re-examination of the relationship between participation and extra benefits in future reviews.

Keywords: Action research; Participatory research; Systematic review.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

No ethical approval was needed for this systematic review.

Consent for publication

None needed.

Competing interests

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow diagram
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Distribution of number of extra benefits for two modes of participation
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Cargo M, Mercer SL. The value and challenges of participatory research: strengthening its practice. Annu Rev Public Health. 2008;29(1):325–350. doi: 10.1146/annurev.publhealth.29.091307.083824. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Green LW, et al. Study of Participatory Research in Health Promotion: Review and recommendations for the development of participatory research in health promotion in Canada. The Royal Society of Canada: Ottawa; 1995.
    1. Waterman, H., et al., Action research: a systematic review and guidance for assessment. Health Technol Assess. 2001;5(23):iii–157. - PubMed
    1. Minkler M, Wallerstein N. Community-based participatory research for health : from process to outcomes. 2. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. xxxv; 2008. p. 508.
    1. Lewin K. Action research and minority problems. J Soc Issues. 1946;2:34–46. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x. - DOI

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding

LinkOut - more resources