Participation, Power and Conflicts. Involvement of Social Service Users and Practitioners in Participatory Research

Background and purpose: Partnership projects grounded in participatory research designs between academics, service providers and users are increasingly promoted as means to improve both research and services. However, there is still a need to shed light on micro-practices to gain insight in how participatory research in partnerships succeed or fail to reach their goals. Research reviews find the need for analysis of participatory research projects that were not successful, as well as studies that capture participants’ own sense-making of the processual development of such projects.

This paper helps to fill this knowledge gap by qualitatively examining a participatory research and development project where conflicts within the project group became hindrances for succeeding with its goals. The group performed promising, developing bottom-up evaluations of social services provisions based on dialogue conferences, but at the same time facing conflicts to such an extent that the group terminated. In the paper, practitioners and users’ experiences of participating in the project are highlighted. The context is a Norwegian governmental funded program, where one goal was promotion of structures for equal collaboration between social work education, research, social service providers and users. 

Methods: The study is a single case study as the intention was to understand the particular process within the project. Data consists of oral and written sources: 8 semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants in the group: The leader (from the social service agency); two social workers; and five user representatives. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. The written documents consist of 50 records, covering all meetings through the project period (3 years). The records provide information on activities and discussions, interacting with the interview data. Data were approached by an interpretative phenomenological analysis, committed to examination of how participants make sense of their experiences. Data were manually coded, informed by the themes in the interview guide and of themes emerging through initial reading of data.

Findings: Findings show how the participants’ reports are dominated by experiences of frustration, tensions and conflicts. Conflicts related to the leadership of the group influenced management and concrete outcomes. The data analysis indicate that both emergence and negotiations of conflicts should be understood within the context of an empowering process that the users went through, running parallel with the development of the project. Some users report destructive potentials in these processes as they experienced paternalism and being overruled. Findings are interpreted within theoretical concepts of conflict and empowerment.

Conclusions and implications: The study underscores the importance of acknowledging conflicts in participatory research, including how conflicts and users’ empowering processes should be understood as complex interwoven. The study indicates the need to critical examine issues on leadership in participatory research.

Further, the study supports the importance of ethnographic studies in order to understand how participatory research projects might deliver: Ethnographic studies enables enhanced understanding of micro-practices, power dynamics, and how this might influence knowledge production in participatory research.