I just undertook a big big thing: a literature review of all the articles on participatory video for health.  This will be most interesting to academic researchers, particularly those that practice community-based and action-oriented approaches to research. I will tell you about how I selected and excluded articles and what I found out about participatory video. In future posts, I will also talk about my findings on photovoice, a participatory approach to research and photography.  As you will see, I did a lot of looking and at the end of the day, only came up with 3 scholarly articles on this topic.  So, good news for new research ideas and bad news for people needing research now!

Read the rest of this entry »

We have joined forces with the University-Community Partnership for Social Action Research Network, a community of practitioners, students, university faculty and staff ready to initiate multicultural collaboration addressing local and global community issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have been pretty immersed in the process of completing our application to the University of California, Berkeley Institutional Review Board (IRB). For those non-researchers out there, this is a committee that looks after the safety and privacy of research participants. Because VideoVoice method and other visual methodologies infringe on privacy in some basic ways, despite all efforts to do so in an ethical manner, getting a research protocol through the IRB process can be harrowing.

Although we just turned in our protocol in yesterday, and we are still waiting to hear what the committee says, here are some tips that I have learned so far:

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

Read the rest of this entry »

The goal of this toolkit is to provide health professional faculty with a set of tools to carefully plan and document their community-engaged scholarship and produce strong portfolios.

For an introduction to the toolkit and its components, please click here. An introductory webconference on the toolkit was held on October 13, 2005. To access, the powerpoint slides and audiorecording from the event, click here.

The navigation bar at the top of this page will take you directly to the different sections of the toolkit. PDF documents are available for the entire toolkit and each unit. Access these documents in the Toolkit Site Index.