For readers not familiar with research or perhaps our specific approach to it (participatory action research) we want to illustrate what this looks like in practice and why we feel this methodology is well suited to studying youth violence. We feel that youth workers need to develop research skills as part of their practical response to violence – an activity we call ethnopraxis. To support them in doing this, we want to provide a detailed chronological account of how we prepared and then worked through our project, gathering data with not on our participants. We hope this will provide some ideas for fellow researchers and youth workers to follow or adapt to their own contexts. We also want to spell out some distinctive additions we made to traditional participatory research methodology such as the use of community philosophy, peer researchers and critical discourse analysis. This all forms part of an attempt to make a contribution to the existing participatory research literature. To this end, we conclude the chapter with some broad ideas borne out of our own experiences on this project.

Participatory research: an overview

Over the past 20 years, various forms of participatory research (such as participatory action research, participatory rapid appraisal, rural rapid assessment and participatory learning in action) have been applied all over the world. Such methodologies have become mainstream in international development agencies such as the World Bank, although some see this as a negative sign (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Participatory research is increasingly being applied in sectors including environmental assessment, health, urban regeneration and social care. It was originally developed in the 1970s and 1980s as an alternative to large-scale survey studies that were perceived to give insufficient attention to people's local knowledge (Petty et al, 1995; Kumar, 2002; Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

Participatory research does not sit easily within the traditional research paradigms (Chambers, 1994, 1997). It shares with interpretive research a desire to break with positivistic, scientific approaches, and the belief that many phenomena are socially constructed (Cohen et al, 2000). However, it differs significantly in its epistemology from interpretative approaches (Lather 1986; Morley 1991) and in its aims (Smith, 2011).