Organizational capacity development in PAR was particularly observed in Teen AIDS Network, which strongly advocated the position that anybody could become a PAR researcher and warmly welcomed six community participants who wanted to become members of Teen AIDS Network.
Youth-led PAR training seemed to provide a crucial link between individual development and organizational development. Based on the comments in the follow-up interviews,tiffany pendants, it appears that youth-led PAR training had positive effects on both PAR trainers and trainees. Furthermore, people from outside organizations, who already had peer education skills, joined Teen AIDS Network after participating in the training. The number of skilled "PAR researchers" in Teen AIDS Network, therefore, significantly increased after the youth-led PAR training, enhancing Teen AIDS Network’s organizational capacity.
Our follow-up interviews with the youth researchers from Teen AIDS Network revealed that the youth-led PAR training provided the youth researchers of Teen AIDS Network with an opportunity to further improve their skills. They were able to reconceptualize and adapt PAR for their organizational use with support from two PAR facilitators from Youth Action. For example,tiffany necklaces, a tool called "Flour Dough Molding" was introduced by Youth Action as an exercise to facilitate discussion of sensitive issues. After the youth-led PAR training was conducted, the youth researchers from Teen AIDS Network used PAR in their own community activities to reach more young people on the subject of HIV/AIDS and extend discussion to related issues, such as teenage pregnancy.
Other organizations also enhanced their organizational capacity. The youth researchers began to employ PAR in their peer education work. Youth Action conducted PAR training for their own staff to develop the capacity of other members to implement PAR and used PAR extensively in their program needs assessment and planning. Youth researchers in Healthy Teen conducted youth-led PAR training for other members of their organizations as well as with external participants.
Discussion
The PAR approach utilizes several features of contemporary ethnographic research, and these features are invaluable in facilitating the goals of PAR-driven projects. It draws heavily on cognitive mapping techniques to facilitate the elicitation, identification, and discussion of beliefs, values, and social conditions that are fundamental to achieving meaningful change. It encourages the discovery of intra-cultural diversity as individual participants are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues, and, thus, avoids the assumptions of homogeneity that are common among non-anthropologically trained researchers, even those who are investigating their own cultures. Local knowledge that is not necessarily known or understood by community leaders is brought to the fore. Through the demonstration of differing perspectives, leaders are exposed to the opportunity to reexamine their own perspectives, which is particularly important for peer educators. The local relationships of community leaders who take on leadership responsibilities in PAR activities are modified or transformed because these roles resemble those of ethnographers; that is, rather than seeing themselves as individuals who are expected to have answers, they become part of a group that is in search of answers.
The results of our study of youth leaders demonstrate that all of these features were involved in the effects that emerged from the interviews. They provide evidence that participation in the RTK project affected the youth leaders’ views of peer education as well as their personal development. It also affected their relationships with other community activists through strengthening networks and affected the activities within their organizations.
Changes in Approach to Peer Education
Through PAR, the youth researchers developed an appreciation for the local cultural knowledge of their peers, the value of critical awareness, and the benefits of engaging in social analysis, all of which may have played a role in leading them to reconceptualize peer education. Many of the youth peer educators learned how to listen to and appreciate the ideas, values, and knowledge of their peers. Some of them specifically articulated the importance of learning about local cultural knowledge and the needs of their peers, in addition to the importance of providing factual information as peer educators. Moreover, they also identified critical analysis of the social and contextual issues that affect participants’ lives as important elements of effective peer education.
While participatory approaches aim to enhance interactions between peer educators and participants, the mere use of interactive tools,tiffany bangles, without the additional concepts of critical awareness and analysis, may not be sufficient to break down the more didactic model of peer education that peer educators typically bring to their work. As Campbell and MacPhail (2002) point out, "participatory peer education" can be didactic and fail to focus on underlying sociocultural factors. The youth peer educators in our study had already used interactive techniques (e.g., games, skits) in their peer education activities prior to their involvement in RTK, but when they began the RTK project, they still held a fundamentally didactic model of education. This changed over the course of their involvement in the project. We hypothesize that leading PAR research activities may have provided the youth educators with the opportunity to reconceptualize peer education and explore the effects of two-way communication for HIV/ AIDS education. The effectiveness of the combination of a "research mind-set" and PAR tools on critical social analysis was also observed in a study in Tanzania, where young people conducted participatory action research with other community members,tiffany cuff Links, focusing on social issues related to HIV/ AIDS, and came up with local actions to solve the identified problems (Bagamoyo College of Arts et al. 2002).
It is important to note that changes in the peer educators’ perspective on education took place gradually. For example, the youth researchers in the Teen AIDS Network articulated their perspectives on the value of PAR only after they significantly improved their own PAR skills by conducting youth-led PAR training. Thus, "one shot training" will probably not be sufficient for individuals to understand and employ PAR in peer education activities. According to Paul (1998), it takes at least one to two years for practitioners to understand PAR.
Individual Development
Our study suggests that the PAR process in RTK helped the youth researchers to develop self-confidence and increased their problem solving skills. Clearly, these enhancements are positive for the individuals who experience them and are likely to have life-long consequences for their careers, their well-being, and their families. A study by Pearlman et al. (2002) evaluating peer education showed a significant intervention effect on adolescents’ self-efficacy, resistance to negative peer pressure, and involvement in activities to help other youth avoid unprotected sex. Powers and Tiffany (2006) also describe the positive developmental impacts of involving youth in participatory research and evaluation efforts.
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