Self-management for empowerment

This chapter draws on the recent experience of one of the authors who developed community-level engagement in an urban health regeneration programme. By engaging with people and exploring and documenting their experiences, she was able to help those who were seeking to acquire self-control and empowerment and, in the process, move away from feeling passive and unable to shape any aspects of their own lives.

The participatory action research (Reason, 1988; Stephen and McTaggart, 1988; Stringer, 1996) involved in this work and discussed in this chapter is best described through reference to Wadsworth's (1998) formulation that participatory action research is a new understanding of social science, because it is:

• • more conscious of ‘problematising’ an existing action or practice, and more conscious of who is problematising it and why;

• • more explicit about ‘naming’ the problem, and more self-conscious about raising an unanswered question and focusing on the answer;

• • more planned and deliberate about commencing a process of inquiry and involving others who could or should be involved in that inquiry;

• • more systematic and rigorous in our efforts to get answers;

• • more carefully documenting and recording action and what people think about it, in more detail and in ways that are accessible to other relevant parties;

• • more intensive and comprehensive in our study, waiting much longer before we ‘jump’ to a conclusion;

• • more self-sceptical in checking our hunches;

• • attempting to develop deeper understandings and more useful and more powerful theory about the matters we are researching, in order to produce new knowledge that can inform improved action or practice; and

• • changing our actions as part of the research process, and then further researching these changed actions. (Wadsworth, 1988)

The chapter begins by discussing how individual awareness about needs can grow to the point where people become able to form groups, dedicated to identifying operational issues and practical tasks that can improve their situation. This process and its constituent parts are described in the first part of the chapter before moving on to an exploration of how the evidence bases that were developed in the first phase of the research were consciously moved into a second phase where the original groups discovered if and how they could influence or impact on policy through networks operating at meso- and even macro-strategic levels (Learmonth, 2005).