ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe the origins and theoretical underpinnings of community-based research, and highlight the characteristics of community-based research that position it within a transformative paradigm. In line with its transformative intent, the authors explain what generating data using a community-based research orientation in the health sciences may entail. The authors argue that it helps uncover needs relevant to communities and engages communities in diverse ways to address social injustices; and support this argument by sharing practice examples of our application of community-based research in partnership with different communities across various stages of the research process. These examples demonstrate the authors’ unique considerations for using community-based research, sharing how, while challenging, community-based research, through its alignment with decolonial perspectives, enriches occupational science to re-orient knowledge production away from dominating paradigms, opening opportunities for exploring the plurality and diversity of human occupation. Such knowledge has value effecting change beyond the borders of reductionist viewpoints of human occupation and clinically oriented occupational therapy.
