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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

3.07 Using research to promote participation and build capacity

The focus of this guidance is approaches to gathering customer or service user views largely on an individual basis, undertaken within a strategic approach to service user feedback. This is likely to be in addition to or as part of a broader tenant participation strategy. However, the distinction between the two approaches is often blurred. With clear planning and purpose, many methods commonly associated with tenant participation, such as public meetings, workshops and conferences can be used to provide feedback on service quality. There is certainly scope to make better use of existing groups (whether formal registered tenants’ organisations or not), for research and consultation purposes, in order to make research and consultation as inclusive as possible.

Many methods outlined here can be adapted to be used in a more or less participatory way, depending on the broader purposes of the exercise. In this way, how these exercises are conducted may contribute to the quality of life, community regeneration and capacity building goals of social housing organisations.

The value of greater participation in research and consultation

There are sound reasons for adopting a more participatory approach to research and consultation on service quality. Greater participation draws on a wider pool of knowledge and diversity of experiences. It makes it more difficult to overlook the perhaps small in number, but important group of people, that have some valuable insight and experience that gets lost in the overall statistics. See the example of Southside Housing Association.

By using methods that engage directly with people and draw on the diversity of experience in a collaborative way, greater understanding of different perspectives, needs and expectations is gleaned. Research and consultation that has greater input from service users themselves may have greater credibility amongst the wider group of service users. In this way the validity and ‘participatory representativeness’ of the research process is enhanced.

Factors which influence the quality of the research such as skills, objectivity and ethical practice arise in participatory research as they do in all approaches to research and consultation. These are discussed in Section 2. The use of researchers who may well be known to the research participants presents issues of potential invasion of privacy and difficulties of disclosure of more sensitive information. On the other hand, familiarity may aid the development of rapport and more honest responses. There is no hard and fast rule and judgements need to be made depending on the topic and the local circumstances. There are strategies that can be used to overcome some of these issues. The well-being and safety of researchers must also be addressed.

How to have more participation

Different levels of participation are commonly described in terms of a ladder which ascends through various stages from tokenism, informing, consultation and involvement to shared decision making and service user control.

Bearing this in mind, it is helpful to think about the desired and practical degree of participation at each stage of the research and consultation process. Service users can be involved at all stages:

• contributing to the design of the service user consultation framework;

• identifying specific topics or issues for research and consultation;

• deciding on appropriate research design and methodology;

• designing data collection tools, such as questionnaires or topic guides;

• data collection/fieldwork;

• data analysis and interpretation;

• reporting findings;

• shaping recommendations for action;

• monitoring implementation of action plans;

• identifying any further research and consultation needs.

All these typical stages can be undertaken with different degrees of participation. One approach might be to involve service users in data collection through training them to be interviewers or mystery shoppers. Another would allow them to decide the nature of the scope of the research exercise and to decide what questions to ask, even if actual data collection is undertaken by others.

Genuine active engagement in the data analysis stage is often seen as difficult. This may be the case with quantitative methods that produce large amounts of statistical data and require specialist skills to analyse it. However, many such surveys are actually quite modest in terms of the kind of analysis that is warranted and there may well be existing computer and statistical skills within the community, or a willingness to develop them.

Qualitative methods which involve sharing and analysis of stories, visual approaches such as Photovoice and other approaches such as storydialogue lend themselves much more to participation in data analysis and by building validation of the interpretation of the data into the process, so enhance the validity and credibility of the data.

Traditional methods of reporting through written media may also make it difficult to have full participation in this stage of the research process, but there are other ways of presenting information that do lend themselves to greater engagement and creativity and offer an opportunity to bring frequently isolated and excluded groups, such as young people, into the process. This is addressed in the section on reporting and acting on findings.

It is important to be realistic about what can be achieved through a participatory research and consultation strategy and the degree of engagement that service users will want. The point is to ask them. Service users are a diverse group and different approaches will be necessary to engage with different groups amongst them and to make research and consultation as inclusive as possible.

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