Understanding Ideology and Common Sense in Participatory Research Methods

Most of us carry assumptions about the world that feel obvious – so self-evident they barely register as assumptions at all. “Hard work leads to success.” “Crime increases when values break down.” These are the kinds of beliefs that circulate as common sense. But what happens when research treats those assumptions as neutral starting points? Sociology has spent over a century wrestling with this question, and participatory and feminist research traditions have pushed the debate further by asking something more pointed: whose common sense gets treated as universal truth?

What Durkheim said about common sense and science
The problem with value-free research
Feminist critiques of research neutrality
Intersectionality and the limits of single-axis analysis
Interrogating ideological location in participatory research
Democratizing knowledge through participatory methods
The role of reflexivity

What Durkheim said about common sense and science

Émile Durkheim, one of the founding figures of modern sociology, drew a sharp line between everyday assumptions and scientific inquiry. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), he argued that the first and most fundamental rule of sociological investigation is to treat social facts as things – that is, as external realities that exist independently of individual perception or opinion. For Durkheim, common sense was precisely the kind of pre-scientific thinking that sociology needed to move beyond.

Social facts, in his framework, are the norms, laws, institutions, and shared beliefs that exist outside any single individual and exert a coercive influence on behavior. They are not the product of personal will, and they cannot be understood through introspection alone. Durkheim insisted that sociologists must collect data, identify patterns, and formulate general laws about society – approaching social phenomena with the same systematic rigor applied in the natural sciences.

This was a genuinely powerful move. It gave sociology a method and pushed researchers to look beyond individual anecdotes toward structural forces. But it also rested on an assumption that has since been challenged at length: that a researcher can observe the social world from a position of genuine neutrality, stripping away bias the way one cleans a lens.

The problem with value-free research

The ideal of the detached, objective researcher – studying society from the outside, unaffected by social position or ideology – has long been central to positivist social science. Yet this ideal has faced sustained critique. Participatory action research (PAR) fundamentally pushes against the notion that experiential distance produces objectivity. As PAR scholars have noted, the questions researchers ask, the communities they choose to study, the methods they select, and the way they interpret findings are all shaped by the ideological frameworks they bring with them – frameworks that are rarely made explicit.

Ideology, in this context, does not simply mean political opinion. It refers to the broader set of beliefs, values, and assumptions through which a researcher makes sense of the world. A researcher studying poverty may frame it primarily as a failure of individual motivation. Another may frame the same data as evidence of structural economic exclusion. Neither framing is politically innocent. Participatory action research recognizes that knowledge reflects the biases and priorities of those who create it, and that those who control how knowledge is produced can exert power over those who do not participate in creating it.

This is why the gap between common sense and scientific inquiry is narrower than it might appear. When mainstream research draws on the assumptions of dominant groups – treating their experiences as the default, their concerns as universal – it does not transcend common sense. It simply institutionalizes a particular version of it.

Feminist critiques of research neutrality

Feminist scholars have been particularly rigorous in exposing the ideological foundations of supposedly neutral research. Research institutions often reproduce ideological assumptions even in empirical and scientific work. Traditional research methodologies, feminists argue, have historically centered the experiences of men – particularly white, middle-class, Western men – while treating this perspective as an objective, universal vantage point.

Patricia Maguire’s 1987 work, Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach, was among the first to identify the androcentric nature of participatory research itself, asking pointedly: where are the women? Her critique revealed that even research methods designed to challenge elite knowledge production could reproduce gender hierarchies if they failed to interrogate their own assumptions.

Out of this tradition came standpoint theory – the argument that knowledge is shaped by the social location of those producing it. According to standpoint theory, marginalized people possess a more nuanced perspective on power, precisely because they have direct experience of how structures of dominance operate. This does not mean marginalized perspectives are automatically correct, but it does mean they capture aspects of social reality that dominant frameworks routinely miss or distort.

Feminist research identified five core principles that overlap directly with participatory approaches: rejection of value-free research, inclusivity, attention to power and empowerment, positionality, and relationships built on collaboration. Each of these principles is, at its core, a response to the myth of the neutral researcher.

Intersectionality and the limits of single-axis analysis

Feminist participatory research also introduced the concept of intersectionality – the recognition that gender cannot be separated from race, class, sexuality, disability, and other dimensions of social identity. An intersectional approach considers an individual’s unique overlap of social identities rather than just one factor in isolation, offering a more complete picture of how power operates. Early feminist research was criticized for overgeneralizing white, middle-class womanhood – treating one group’s experience as representative of all women. Intersectionality corrected this by insisting on specificity.

What this means for research methodology is direct: a researcher who ignores intersecting identities will produce findings that systematically misrepresent the communities they study. Research that treats “women” as a homogeneous category, or that studies “communities” without attending to internal hierarchies of race and class, does not achieve objectivity. It achieves a different kind of distortion.

Interrogating ideological location in participatory research

The concept of ideological location – sometimes called positionality – refers to the recognition that every researcher occupies a specific place within social structures. That place shapes what they can see, what they take for granted, and what they are likely to overlook. Positionality includes both fixed and fluid attributes – political affiliation, gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and disability – all of which influence the research process, whether acknowledged or not.

Participatory and feminist researchers do not argue that ideological location makes research impossible. They argue the opposite: maintaining a critical awareness of one’s own standpoint and biases can ensure that a researcher does not impose their own understanding or values onto a participant or situation. Transparency about ideological location is not a concession to subjectivity – it is a condition for more rigorous and honest research.

In practice, this means that a researcher studying rural women’s access to healthcare should not simply assume they understand the barriers those women face. They should actively reflect on the assumptions embedded in the questions they are asking, ensure that the women being studied have genuine input into what is being studied and how, and be transparent about the values shaping their interpretation. Research methods that fail to incorporate examinations of power and positionality are not objective so much as failing to transparently examine the social and historical contexts within which research takes place.

Democratizing knowledge through participatory methods

PAR pushes against the notion that experiential distance is required for objectivity in research, and instead values embodied knowledge beyond gated communities of scholarship. Where traditional research treats communities as passive subjects – sources of data to be extracted and analyzed by credentialed experts – participatory research treats them as co-creators of knowledge. This is not merely a procedural adjustment. It reflects a fundamentally different view of what knowledge is and who has the authority to produce it.

Participatory action research can challenge and disrupt social problems by including historically marginalized and silenced groups in the production of new knowledge – knowledge that is more likely to reflect their actual experiences, priorities, and concerns. When communities participate in defining research questions and interpreting findings, the resulting knowledge is not just more inclusive. It is more accurate.

This is where the critique of Durkheim’s framework becomes most pointed. Durkheim was right that common sense should not be the uncritical foundation of social science. But the solution is not to replace common sense with a supposedly universal scientific gaze that is, in practice, shaped by its own unexamined ideological location. The solution is to make those locations explicit, to include perspectives that have historically been excluded, and to treat the lived experience of marginalized communities not as noise to be filtered out but as a legitimate and necessary form of expertise.

The role of reflexivity

Central to participatory and feminist approaches is reflexivity – the ongoing practice of critically examining one’s own role, assumptions, and power within the research process. Awareness of positionality can serve as a guide for researchers in navigating power dynamics between themselves and the communities they work with. This is not a one-time declaration at the start of a project. It requires sustained attention throughout the entire research process – from the formulation of questions, through data collection, to the interpretation and dissemination of findings.

Reflexivity does not eliminate the influence of ideological location. But it makes that influence visible and subject to critical scrutiny, which is precisely what rigorous inquiry demands. Decolonizing the research process requires strong collaborations between members of diverse cultural communities so their perspectives can be meaningfully included in academic spaces – and this requires researchers willing to examine and account for their own position within existing hierarchies of knowledge and power.

What do you think? If every researcher brings an ideological location to their work, is the goal to eliminate that influence or to make it transparent – and is there a meaningful difference between those two approaches? And if lived experience is a form of expertise, how should research institutions and academic journals change to genuinely reflect that?

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Table of Contents

What Durkheim said about common sense and science 🔗

The problem with value-free research 🔗

Feminist critiques of research neutrality 🔗

Intersectionality and the limits of single-axis analysis 🔗

Interrogating ideological location in participatory research 🔗

Democratizing knowledge through participatory methods 🔗

The role of reflexivity 🔗