Introduction

Is user involvement in research and evaluation necessarily an empowering and liberatory activity? This has been a growing question for service users, serviceuser organisations and service-user researchers. There has been a tendency traditionally to approach benign sounding ideas like ‘participation’, ‘user involvement’ and ‘empowerment’ relatively uncritically. More recently, they have been subjected to more critical consideration. Their complexity and ambiguity have begun to be explored (see Baistow, 1995; Beresford and Croft, 1996; Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Increasingly, service users and service-user researchers are now concluding that the potential of user involvement in research and evaluation depends on the nature, process, purpose and methods of such research and evaluation.

At the same time, movements of disabled people, mental health service users/survivors, people with learning difficulties, older people, people living with HIV/AIDS and so on, have developed their own research approaches, as well as undertaking their own research. The disabled people's movement was a pioneer in taking this forward. It identified a range of principles and values for research and evaluation. These included that research and evaluation should:

• • be based on more equal relationships between researchers and research participants;

• • work to support the empowerment of service users; challenging their disempowerment; and

• • be committed to making broader political, social and economic change in line with the rights of service users (Oliver, 1996; Mercer, 2002).

Such an approach places question marks for some service users and serviceuser researchers over getting involved in research, which is not explicitly committed to these goals.

This questioning of whether user involvement in research may have regressive and regulatory implications as well as liberatory and empowering ones comes at a significant time. It is happening when there is increasing endorsement and support for greater user involvement in research from many quarters: from government, statutory and non-statutory research funders and commissioners; and from a growing number of researchers, research institutions, policy makers and practitioners, as well as from many service users and their organisations.

Some key concerns

There is thus a tension in current developments in user involvement in research. At once, there are increasing requirements and provisions for it and a growing questioning (particularly by service users) of its purpose and merits.