ABSTRACT
As a doctoral student in the 1990s I was introduced to Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Participatory Research (PR) at the UBC Institute of Health Promotion Research (UBCIHPR) during sessions capably facilitated by Dr. L.W. Green, an internationally esteemed health promotion researcher and scholar. At the time, the IHPR was preparing a White Paper for the Royal Society to guide the evaluation of the quality of participatory approaches to research that would be used to guide researchers and peer-reviewers to navigate this new and, to many people, mysterious, terrain of science of health promotion. As a group of researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students, during these sessions we engaged in lively conversations about “What is PAR/PR?” “How is this research?” Concurrently, as a doctoral student in nursing, I was grappling with definitions of health-promoting nursing practice 1 in the midst of what seemed to me were a plethora of unclear and conflicting definitions. As the IHPR conversations progressed, there was resonance between what I was coming to understand were key principles of health-promoting nursing practice and participatory approaches to research such as PAR and PR. Discovering this synchronicity between practice and research was thrilling for me. As a nurse, I began to see how I might not only generate knowledge for health-promoting nursing practice, but how the research process itself could be health promoting! This aha moment launched me on a journey of understanding, applying, and critiquing the relevance of PAR for my nursing research practice.
