Co-production of research

Co-production is pretty much what it says on the tin. It is co-(together-) production (producing something). It could apply to anything from me sitting with my daughter to produce a birthday card together, to a film unit making a documentary.

In public service jargon, it has more specialised (and highly disputed) meanings. It is variously used to describe a public service talking to people using the service, statutory bodies working with third sector bodies, a social worker and disabled person working out how the disabled person can get the support they want or a public service finding a way to work on an equal footing with members of the local community to make sure the community gets the services they want.  For what it’s worth, I reserve the term ‘co-production’ for the latter two usages, because the first is just a rebranding of engagement or involvement activity (ie have a say, but we control how much say you can have) and the second is already adequately covered by the concept of partnership working. What the latter two uses share is a disruption of social norms, reframing of relationships and an acknowledgement of shared power.

Co-production is increasingly used in relation to social research, frequently bringing its public service meanings. 

Co-production in social research currently overlaps concepts of emancipatory, inclusive, democratised and participatory research.  It includes collaborative research. And it overlaps much that is fundamental to the practice of good quality qualitative social research.  I would argue that you can’t do good quality qualitative research if you don’t at least check your interpretation with the people who gave you the data in the first place – ie if you don’t co-produce the analysis. [If you think you can, then the chances are that you are using a qualitative method with a positivist mindset and (I’d argue) this takes the point out of qualitative research - but thereby hangs another blog.]

Power

Both social research and public services face immense challenges in trying to renegotiate power relationships within structures that assign power, control and accountability to some and passive, dependent roles to others. In public services this is most clearly seen by the divide between those who are and aren’t employees of the organisation, between those deemed inside and those deemed outside information and data-sharing circles. In research, the divide is created by the drawing of the ethical approval/informed consent dividing line.

This social research non-negotiable dividing line is between relationships that  requires ethical approval and (signed) informed consent from one party before the relationship can begin, and relationships that exist on the academic side of the dividing line. For example, non-academics could be involved in co-production as joint applicants with an academic for a grant, putting both parties on the academic side of the line. In this situation, the relationship can begin, develop and flourish within needing ethical approval. Or the co-production could involve the kind of ongoing work on data interpretation found in some ethnography – where the members of the community under study become research participants (needing ethical approval) rather than research collaborators (on the academic side).  This has profound implications for nature of the relationship.

At times, decisions about which sides of the line to put the co-producers seem arbitrary. But once allocated a side, there are strict procedural rules to govern their research relationship. If the co-producers are on the same side of the line, there are ways to negotiate power dynamics that allow both parties to have equal voice, choice and control, while recognising the different skills, knowledges and experience each bring to the relationship.  Put the ‘co-producers’ on different sides of the line though  and –

And you have destroyed any chance of full-blown, transformative, meaningful co-production. You have diminished co-production to the level of choosing when and how to allow people to have a voice as research participants while retaining the power on the side of the academics.

What you may have is a better way of doing social research, because those being researched are allowed to have more voice within and about the research. This can only lead to better qualitative research.

But what you do not have is co-production. Nothing has changed in terms of

• power relationships within the research (academic chooses the extent to which participants can exercise power)
• attribution of the research when it is published (ie to the academic is named, usually with little or no acknowledgement of the essential role and crucial inputs of those on ‘the Other side’ of the procedural ethics line)
• disruption of social norms (it's business as usual, with the added warm glow on the academic side of empowering people and the desperate hope on the participant side that their voice has been heard and made a difference)
• challenging inequality between researcher and researched 

As part of talking co-production in research, therefore, we need to talk about the power dynamics that lie behind the procedural ethics of universities, NHS and other bodies.  We need to talk about what determines which side of the line people should be. We need to talk about relationship ethics, the ethics of interpretation, authorship and ownership.

I don’t have the answers to this. I don’t know how we carry out ethical co-productive research.

I do know that no-one wins when we use the term ‘co-production’ loosely because we think it adds credence to our research.

In the meantime, let's avoid the lazy and potentially misleading use of 'co-production' to describe our research, and make explicit the power dynamics, relational ethics and procedural ethics of our research relationships.