Evidence Library

Abstract: This article provides a critique of service user involvement in social work research. It explores some of the practical, ethical and political challenges which include the following concerns: • Are there are easier, cheaper, less time-consuming and perhaps more accurate ways to collect and analyse qualitative data than involving service users as co-researchers? • Should the reported benefits of involvement for service users (e.g. increased employment opportunities) be a responsibility for researchers – when such goals may be better achieved by government policy? • Do researchers have sufficient resources and skills that are essential for successful involvement? • Can a power imbalance ever be avoided when researchers have specialist knowledge, skills, training and qualifications? • Does participation in research make a genuine and lasting difference to the people who participate when other aspects of their lives (such as poor housing, living in poverty) are not affected? • Does participation in research only serve to provide evidence to reinforce existing inequalities, for example to support social work interventions that punish poor people and are disproportionately targeted at working class women? • Do researchers benefit more from involvement than service users – when it advances researchers’ careers, helps build empires and attracts funding in competitive times? • Is participation truly emancipatory? • Is participation in research genuinely helpful to service users if the wider political and social structures remain unchanged, maintaining exclusion and inequality? The author finally questions whether involvement in research has achieved much for service user groups, despite having being practised for some time.

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Categories: social care
reflecting on public involvement in research
journal article

Date Entered: 2015/04/28

Date Edited: 2015/04/28