Welcome to the book!

We hope you enjoy reading and using this book. It is written with a clear aim – to help organisations and practitioners across a wide range of fields to do research with the people and communities they work with. We absolutely believe we need more research in practice to better understand and develop practice from within. Practitioners are in a great position to do this. We call this approach participatory research as we work with people and engage them to participate as fully as possible in research.

In order to help organisations and practitioners in their participatory research we have written this book in down to earth, accessible and practice-based language. We know that research isn’t many people’s day job and often isn’t a priority. So this practice-based approach is different to most research books, mainly because it is really pragmatic, based within the realities of everyday practice (limited time, resource, access, buy-in and constant pressure to meet the needs of the people and communities we are working with). At points we have also highlighted common research terms, as some people might be interested in knowing more about what is underpinning this research approach. The book walks you through every step of the research journey as practically as possible, with examples and tools signposted along the way. You could use it as a guide to take the first step in exploring a particular user need that has come to light, or that thing you had always wanted to know more about, or you may have some funding to do some investigation or evaluation of a project. You may read it for interest, inspiration or confidence. You could share it with your colleague, team member or manager to inspire others to think – hey, what if we could just do some research on our practice!

We believe participatory research is a very powerful form of research for three reasons. Firstly, it creates knowledge from people’s first-hand experiences (or lived experience), making sure the research, and the knowledge that comes from it, is relevant.