The critical communicative methodology (CCM) is a methodological response to the dialogic turn of societies and sciences that has already had an important impact in transforming situations of inequality and exclusion. Research conducted with the CCM implies continuous and egalitarian dialogue among researchers and the people involved in the communities and realities being studied. To this dialogue, researchers bring existing scientific knowledge, and the researched subjects contribute knowledge from their lifeworlds. In this process, new understandings emerge informing solutions to many social problems. Later, social actors lobby for the development of effective social policy based on those solutions. This article presents the CCM, its main principles, techniques, and achievements relating them to the life and person of Jesús Gómez (“Pato”), who deeply engaged in the development of this methodology, always with passion and intellectual rigor and a profound commitment to social justice.

Communicative methodology has been acknowledged as having an impact at all levels: social, political, and scientific. The social impact is achieved with communicative methodology by involving the people or communities we intend to study from the beginning to the end of the research. There are positive benefits to those involved, which increases the impact. Therefore, communicative methodology enhances the potential of stakeholders (including those traditionally excluded) for social transformation through the use of egalitarian dialogue. Additionally, those stakeholders co-lead the research and promote change in their own social environments because of their inclusion in all stages of the research process. The theoretical basis of communicative methodology led to the assumption of postulates that enable social transformation. Researchers, taking into account the theoretical principles and postulates, interpret reality through dialogic knowledge while researching with vulnerable populations. This article illustrates how it is possible to attain social impact using communicative methodology in diverse contexts and points out how the communicative organization of research and the communicative analysis of data can be decisive in attaining social impact. Such change contributes to the social and educational transformation of reality and to improving the lives of vulnerable populations.

The critical communicative methodology has been developed by the Center of Research in Theories and Practices that Overcome Inequalities, CREA, as a research response to the dialogic turn of societies and sciences. It stresses that egalitarian dialogues between the scientific community and the lifeworld of the researched subjects are necessary to reach greater levels of social justice. For this dialogue to occur, the critical communicative methodology involves participants in all the stages, from the definition of the research questions until the interpretation and dissemination of results. In this article, we explain in depth the critical communicative methodology, its differences with other research approaches, the characteristics of the communicative organization of research studies, the communicative techniques for collecting empirical materials, and the communicative analysis. We also provide examples of the socio-political impact of Spanish and European research studies conducted with the critical communicative methodology to show the multiple ways through which dialogic research contributes to transform reality and improve the lives of the groups studied. The article is also a historical narrative that shows the ongoing development and impact of the critical communicative methodology over its now ten years of history.

For decades, qualitative research methodologies have incorporated the voice of the participants in their designs and developments. Now, the increasing importance of social impact of the research worldwide has created a new scenario for qualitative researchers, in which the egalitarian dialogue could be one of the key elements. The traditional incorporation of participants into research process is not enough; we need to incorporate new components as the egalitarian dialogue in the research process to assure the social impact of the research. In this article, we first situate the concept of egalitarian dialogue and how it has been used in a great diversity of situation and areas, and second how when we use it, we can obtain both, a greater social impact, and an enrichment of the qualitative methodological research process. We based our work in a literature review in both, the main journals included in ISI Web of Science and Scopus, highlighting the journals on qualitative methodologies and revising Horizon 2020 and Seventh Framework Projects included in the CORDIS database. This literature review presents how different research groups and researchers have used egalitarian dialogue, mainly in the last decade, as an important element to reach social impact with their research.