Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface and acknowledgements
- one Sociology and survivor research: an introduction
- two Mental health service users’ experiences and epistemological fallacy
- three Doing good carer-led research: reflecting on ‘Past Caring’ methodology
- four Theorising service user involvement from a researcher perspective
- five How does who we are shape the knowledge we produce? Doing collaborative research about personality disorders
- six Where do service users’ knowledges sit in relation to professional and academic understandings of knowledge?
- seven Recognition politics as a human rights perspective on service users’ experiences of involvement in mental health services
- eight Theorising a social model of ‘alcoholism’: service users who misbehave
- nine “Hard to reach”? Racialised groups and mental health service user involvement
- ten Individual narratives and collective knowledge: capturing lesbian, gay and bisexual service user experiences
- eleven Alternative futures for service user involvement in research
- twelve Brief reflections
- Appendix Details of the seminar series
- Index
eleven - Alternative futures for service user involvement in research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface and acknowledgements
- one Sociology and survivor research: an introduction
- two Mental health service users’ experiences and epistemological fallacy
- three Doing good carer-led research: reflecting on ‘Past Caring’ methodology
- four Theorising service user involvement from a researcher perspective
- five How does who we are shape the knowledge we produce? Doing collaborative research about personality disorders
- six Where do service users’ knowledges sit in relation to professional and academic understandings of knowledge?
- seven Recognition politics as a human rights perspective on service users’ experiences of involvement in mental health services
- eight Theorising a social model of ‘alcoholism’: service users who misbehave
- nine “Hard to reach”? Racialised groups and mental health service user involvement
- ten Individual narratives and collective knowledge: capturing lesbian, gay and bisexual service user experiences
- eleven Alternative futures for service user involvement in research
- twelve Brief reflections
- Appendix Details of the seminar series
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter will seek to raise the reader's awareness of the often taken-for-granted assumptions about the future for service user researchers. In particular, it is not assumed that there is only one potential future, but many, all of which have their own implications for both service user researchers and non-service user researchers. The chapter will begin by identifying what we mean by a service user, identifying some of the strengths and limitations of this concept, and the notion of participatory research, before highlighting the way service users have been involved in research, the differing claims made for types of service user researchers and concluding by examining potential futures for service user researchers.
It is important to state from the very beginning that I am a supporter of service user involvement in research. I firmly believe that we have traditionally missed out on an important aspect of research's potential and impoverished our understanding of research's meaning and effectiveness by failing to actively involve service users in the research process concerning issues that directly affect them.
What does it mean to be a service user?
The notion of a service user is at first a social construction that attempts to define an identity and a relationship between those who commission or provide services and those who are the recipients of those services. It is important to note that the terms ‘service user’ and ‘service provider’ are not neutral entities and, as McDonald (2006, p 115) has rightly observed:
The words we use to describe those who use our services are, at one level, metaphors that indicate how we conceive them. At another level such labels operate discursively constructing both the relationship and the attendant identities of people participating in the relationship including very practical and material outcomes.
The term ‘service user’ was an attempt to acknowledge that those who were in receipt of welfare services had a right to have a say in the services they received or wished to receive. This new relationship sought to challenge the previous use of such terms as ‘client’, ‘consumer’, ‘customer’, ‘expert by experience’ or ‘patient’, all of which McLaughlin (2009b) has shown to be seriously flawed and signify different types of relationships and power differentials between professionals and those they seek to serve.
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- Information
- Mental Health Service Users in ResearchCritical Sociological Perspectives, pp. 153 - 170Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2013