The Challenges and Rewards of Collaborative Community-Based Research for Social Change: Interview with Corey Shdaimah and Sanford Schram

Episode 82: Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast is about how to balance the demands of doing good research with the passion that practitioners and advocates have for addressing the social problems that face their communities. My guests are Corey Shdaimah and Sanford Schram. I speak with Corey and Sandy about the differences between Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and why they use PAR rather than CBPR in their work with communities. They give examples of how challenging it is to actually do PAR. They talked about the need to bridge the gap between research and practice and how that was one of their motivations for writing their text, Change Research. Throughout our conversation Sandy and Corey bring up lots of ideas that are perfect discussion points for research classes, both at the masters and doctoral level. For those of you interested in learning more about doing the kind of community-based change research that we talk about in today's episode, I posted a list of resources on socialworkpodcast.com that Corey very generously provided. You can connect with other social workers at the Social Work Podcast Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/swpodcast, or follow the Twitter feed http://www.twitter.com/socworkpodcast. You can listen to the Social Work Podcast from socialworkpodcast.com, by downloading the episodes through iTunes or any number of other apps, or you can stream the 10 most recent episodes right from your mobile device using the Stitcher Radio mobile app http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/social-work-podcast/the-social-work-podcast.