What is Community Research

This chapter introduces the community engagement strategy of the Community Network Analysis (CNA) project and considers its significance to research and practice in socio-technical design and social networking systems within the context of community technology. CNA uses a participatory action research (PAR) methodology grounded in community development principles. Employing the Community Development Foundation’s “involvement ready” model, the project adopted a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis—community profiling, social network analysis, participatory learning workshops, and community communication space prototyping. The immersive nature of the project’s engagement strategy was designed to facilitate an interpretevist understanding of the complexities of West Hove community ecology. The project’s community-based participatory research approach is described together with the project’s contribution to knowledge, some of its significant outputs and outcomes and the tensions between the practices of community research and community development actions.