Annual Reports
Participatory Research at McGill (PRAM)
Ongoing Research
2025 brought in another CIHR project grant – a five-year $1.1M Botswana RECOVER project (Reverse the Culture of Violence) involving youth co-design of prevention strategies for gendered personal and interpersonal violence. The participatory dementia prevention APROACH project is well underway in Montreal and rural Botswana, with new proposal for an extension in Nigeria and Nunavik. As part of the Botswana Malata project, looking at child labour outside their homes, our Botswana team works closely with the Social Protection Division of the Ministry of Local Government to define actions based on the results from fuzzy cognitive mapping and a pilot cross-sectional study.
In Mexico, we explored Indigenous self-care practices, cultural continuity and health outcomes during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period with CIET Mexico.
In Nunavik we continued our work on culturally safe health services and childbirth with Nunavimmiut through two CIHR-funded projects. Inuit participants codesigned a pilot family house in Montreal to provide services to Nunavimmiut accompanying women evacuated for childbirth. The pilot family house in Montreal is now part of an Inuit-led program supported by a resolution of the Nunavik Regional Board for Health and Social Services (NRBHSS). In partnership with the Nunavik Youth House Association (NYHA), an Indigenous PhD student co-designed a project with staff, Elders, and youth to strengthen services and engagement across Nunavik’s youth houses. In Kuujjuaq, another PhD student is collaborating with the Ungava Tulattavik Health Centre (UTHC) to explore how Inuit with special needs and their service providers understand cultural safety and how to incorporate it in UTHC programs.
In Montreal, we shared the results of a youth-led project exploring teenagers’ perspectives on health services, which has contributed to enhanced engagement with the Herzl Teenage Health Unit. We are also involved in a project that addresses the significant imbalance in participation between older women and older men in brain health research in collaboration with the Geddes’ Lab for Motivational Neuromedicine.
In Nigeria, the research team has supported adolescents in creating cellphilms that document changes they have experienced in themselves and their communities during a participatory research project focused on adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH). The work on the social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has reported encouraging preliminary results in increasing social capital among affected communities and is entering its final stage with a post-intervention impact assessment.
2025 in numbers
In 2025, CIET-PRAM members published 10 peer-reviewed papers and 1 book chapter, and presented our work at 4 national and 5 international conferences. Our PhD student, Sonia Michaelse, successfully defended her thesis, and three additional PhD students made strong progress in their research. We also received a grant award for the RECOVER project in Botswana.
We hosted three summer interns, including a McBurney fellow, a master’s student in public health from the University of British Columbia, and a medical resident from Spain. Our team also advised 7 students from different fields and supported 17 international researchers through our 13-hour online short course program. Our team continued offering three graduate courses on relevant aspects of participation science.
2024 Highlights
2023 Highlights
In 2023, the members of CIET-PRAM published 14 peer-reviewed papers and presented at 9 national and 9 international conferences. Another of our PhD students successfully defended her thesis, while four PhD and two Master’s students continued their research projects. Two medical, one physiology, and one psychology student summer interns completed their stay with us by publishing their work in a reputable journal.
Ongoing Research
With an active portfolio of 14 projects with competitive funding ($14.5m), CIET-PRAM members are nominated principal applicants on 8 projects (total $7.5m). Three Canadian projects emphasize cultural safety with Nunavimiut. One project codesigns interventions for Inuit women transferred to hospitals in Montreal for childbirth (CIHR $1.74m), another co-designing cultural safety training and procedures in health facilities in Nunavik (CIHR $1.89m). Both cultural safety projects are training opportunities for post-doctoral, doctoral and undergraduate (summer) students. 2024 will be the final reporting year of the Quebec Indigenous Health Research Mentorship Network involving six Quebec universities (CIHR $1m).
Two projects in Bauchi, northern Nigeria, build on our 16-year partnerships there. New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF $497,869) supports innovative knowledge translation approaches to inform evidence-based community-led decision-making for COVID-19 recovery. Another project engages youth and other stakeholders to co-design strategies to improve adolescent sexual and reproductive health (CIHR $1.43m).
We have three projects in Botswana. An ethnographic study documents the life stories of people who have experienced unpaid and forced labour as children, in preparation for a larger study to address this common problem of domestic human trafficking (CIHR $100,000). Completing our third decade of research on prevention of gendered violence in southern Africa, we are piloting a new approach to prevention that addresses the continuum or culture of violence — including gender violence and youth suicide (CIHR $100,000). The pilot Authentic Participatory Research with Older Adults for Cognitive Health (APROACH) project in Botswana and Montreal will prepare for a major international randomized controlled trial (CIHR $888,165).
With our Colombian partners, CIET-PRAM supports Indigenous leaders in a national dialogue on traditional medicine in the national healthcare system. We supported a mentorship program led by traditional healers in the Colombian Amazon (Vaupés) to train apprentices and to reinforce initiation rites of girls and boys taking up traditional roles in their communities. Building on our successful Mexican experience with safe birth in cultural safety, we support evidence gathering on traditional self-care practices among pregnant women in Bogotá and on how public hospitals might provide health care that is more respectful of patient cultural practices.
In 2022, CIET/PRAM continued promoting the transformative engagement of researchers with decision-makers, healthcare providers, patients and communities in the co-production and use of knowledge to improve health and healthcare. Our team obtained more than $850,000 in additional funding for participatory research in Nigeria, Mexico, and Colombia. This funding supplements our current projects and partnerships in Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Nigeria, and Uganda. We continued to provide training on advanced participatory research methods for Master’s and doctoral students (FEMD 603, 604, 615, and 702) and community members. We expanded and disseminated the use of techniques that enable diverse voices to contribute to knowledge creation. We offered an international course for the Society for Medical Decision Making and showcased our work at international conferences (ten oral and four poster presentations). In 2022, our unit welcomed a Ph.D. and a Master’s student (awarded with Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s program), totaling five Ph.D. students and one postdoctoral fellow. We’ve had a great time working with five medical student interns on our projects over the summer.
CIET/PRAM’s monthly newsletter, which was launched in 2022, has been reaching nearly 1,000 recipients worldwide. We have also provided online tools to disseminate our developments on the use of fuzzy cognitive mapping in participatory research, which other research groups at McGill and beyond have adopted.
Our ongoing projects in Nunavik have seen exciting developments with the engagement of senior Inuit leadership, led by Ms. Minnie Grey, and multiple community members who participated in fuzzy cognitive mapping sessions across the Ungava and Hudson bays. We also continued to support the Quebec Indigenous Mentorship Network Program (Teionkwaienawa:kon) during its final year to extend its important contributions towards positioning Indigenous perspectives in the universities of Quebec.
Participatory research and management involve partnerships with people affected by research issues and those who use research results. It applies participatory sciences to create and to translate knowledge for action or change in health practice or policy, or individual, community or population health.
Led by Professor Neil Andersson, PRAM promotes scholarship on participatory research and management; offers expertise and training in participatory research; and increases patient and community engagement in the management of health care. In 2020 PRAM included 2 Master’s students, 9 Ph.D. and 2 postdoctoral fellows, two full professors, one assistant professor, and one professor of practice. The team delivered graduate courses on participatory research and management, knowledge translation, and indigenous health (FMED603, FMED604, FMED702, FMED615, FMED506, and FMED611). Prof Andersson is a co-director of the McGill Institute of Human Development and Wellbeing, responsible for the research axis on Participation across the Life-course.