Webinar: Participatory Research: What It Is and How It Can Strengthen Your Reentry Program

Participatory research is an approach to creating knowledge and prioritizing expertise from a wide range of people. These include research experts, community residents, and—importantly—people with lived experience, who have direct involvement with the issues being studied. Specifically, participatory research includes people with lived experience in research projects as partners, not only as data sources. Both the research and the participatory researchers benefit from this approach.  

Benefits for the research include: 

• Insight into what matters most to affected community members, which can influence the selection of measures and outcomes;  
• Access to people who previously were hard to reach, leading to more generalizable findings;  
• The ability to elicit more honest responses from research participants, resulting in better quality and validity of data; and  
• Development of recommendations that are more likely to meet community needs. 

Benefits for the participatory researchers include: 

• Increased social capital and technical skills that can open doors to meaningful employment;   
• Greater power and agency among people affected by the criminal legal system; and 
• Leadership development. 

This webinar from the Evaluation and Sustainability Training and Technical Assistance (ES TTA) team at RTI International and the Center for Justice Innovation (formerly the Center for Court Innovation) discusses the participatory research approach to reentry evaluations, as well as the benefits this approach has for the research as well as the participatory researchers. 

Speakers include:

• Rachel Swaner, Research Director, Center for Court Innovation
• Monica Sheppard, Research Analyst, Transformative Research Unit for Equity, RTI International
• Michael Cannon, Reentry Navigator, Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership
• Elizabeth Johnston, Reentry Department Intern, Family Services of Montgomery County