Action research a Handbook for Students

participatory research is attributed to Swantz [Park 1992].

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Tanzanian community, having been adopted as a daughter of a local shaman 
who included her in his family and enabled her identification with norms, values 
and cultural patterns of the locals. This allowed her to understand how impor-
tant for participatory research it is to identify with the native group with which 
the research is conducted, and to avoid the way of thinking derived from the 
researcher’s own culture.
After conducting a series of pilot research, carried out by Swantz and local 
students who were educated for this purpose at the Tanzanian Dar es Salaam 
University, in 1975 she initiated a large-scale project commissioned by the Finn-
ish Ministry of Culture and Youth and the Academy of Finland [Swantz 2008]. 
The research conducted in the Bagamoyo district concerned mainly people’s 
resistance to being moved to new villages. The government’s intention was to 
improve people’s access to healthcare and education, but due to a strong attach-
ment to their living places, they preferred to stay where they had always lived.
Researchers wanted to learn the opinions of the studied population about 
the future and their own development. For this purpose, they lived among the 
locals, sharing their homes. They organised workshops during which the locals 
worked in groups with researchers and with the representatives of the local gov-
ernment, or other events where local historians shared their knowledge on the 
village’s past. A lot of attention was paid to the integrational character of these 
meetings, by organising dance events and other artistic activities.
The outcome of the research was the increase in the critical awareness of the 
local inhabitants in terms of opportunities provided by access to education or 
healthcare. Not everyone made the decision to move to better situated villages, 
but as Swantz remarks, thirty years after the research was carried out it is pos-
sible to note significant development of the system of managing resettlements 
to more civilised places in Tanzania [Swantz 2008] Furthermore, the researcher 
discovered that both students and locals were much more effective in collecting 
information from people than specialised and educated social studies researchers 
working in her team. According to the scholar, the process of data collection 
should be based on local knowledge and local practices. Both researchers and 
the local population are at the same time practitioners and theoreticians who