Introduction

Public service and research arenas are currently witnessing strong pressures to ‘involve’ service users in social care research, policy and practice. These pressures come from policy makers and the providers of services but also, as Peter Beresford (2001) has argued, from the users of welfare themselves; thus the involvement agendas of both the ‘makers’ and the ‘subjects’ of policy appear to coincide. This apparent consensus, however, belies the complex nature of the relationships and processes of user involvement and the strong feelings that can be aroused. It is these relationships, processes and feelings which form the focus of our exploration of user involvement in this chapter. Although we include discussion of user involvement policy – part of the broader UK government agenda to promote more participatory forms of governance – our primary concern here is user involvement in research; albeit research for policy and practice.

The different parties to user involvement are frequently presented as discrete groups: ‘service users’ who are the ‘recipients’ or ‘subjects’ of welfare policies and ‘researchers’ and ‘policy makers’ who are the ‘architects’ of those policies. Indeed, the notion of involvement assumes a separation between ‘service users’ and the research and policy-making processes in which, increasingly, their involvement is required. As with other participatory methodologies (see, for example, Reason and Bradbury, 2001), user involvement presents challenges to more traditional approaches to social research in that it is carried out ‘with’ (rather than ‘on’) those who are being researched. The challenges of such involvement extend to the realm of epistemology/ies and positivist assumptions about the separation of ‘knower’ and ‘known’. They also prompt reconsideration of the personal and political dimensions of social research and the extent to which user involvement can be meaningfully conducted without reinforcing the separations on which it is based. Drawing on our own work in this area (Boxall et al, 2004; Warren and Cook, 2005; Chau, 2007), this chapter illustrates some of the complexities of user involvement in research, which become apparent when ‘users’ and ‘university researchers’ work together. Thus, our discussion is concerned with the meanings and politics of user involvement in research as well as the methods and practices of such involvement.

Such discussion is particularly relevant to this volume's reconsideration of the processes and practices of policy. As we highlight later, service users are not new actors in the policy process.