Participatory action research and health social work

The purpose of this paper is to describe a Participatory Action Research project that was carried out with a national group of social work practitioners and educators about the definition of health. This paper will consider Participatory Action Research as a critical methodology, and then describe the importance of using this research methodology with a group of social workers about their conceptualizations of health. Social work is concerned with the experience of health, and yet its unique way of understanding health is frequently subsumed within work contexts that are dominated by bio-physiological conceptualizations of health. The suggestion put forth in this paper is that the social worker's disciplinarian knowledge thus becomes a subjugated knowledge. The research methodology itself was intentional in clearing space and providing legitimacy to the knowledge of social workers. The participants in the research project demonstrated a conceptualization of health that includes social, subjective, and contextualized experience