Interview with Professor Petra Svedberg at Halmstad University and Anneli Gustafsson, NSPH coordinator/postdoc at Umeå University
What are you doing in this project?
All UserInvolve projects are carried out in co-production in various ways, and the aim here is to draw on our overall experience of this. By co-production, we mean that the research is conducted in collaboration with those most closely affected by the research, i.e., users, staff, user associations, and various welfare actors. We believe that these actors can contribute invaluable knowledge and experience from “real life” to our research. Their expertise and perspectives are essential for the research to achieve the desired value and impact in practice. In concrete terms, they can, for example, help us identify research questions, make informed selections, identify important data, and reach target groups for the research. It may also involve checking whether analyses and conclusions appear reasonable and balanced, given the partners' different experiences and competencies.
Why is this an important area to study?
Research on service user involvement in mental health care is increasingly being conducted through co-production, but despite this, there are still few scientifically proven methods, theoretical models, and follow-up instruments that can support the work of ensuring that co-production processes are rewarding and valuable.
What have you done so far in the project?
We have developed the UserInvolves toolkit for evaluating co-produced research. The toolkit consists of a guide for co-production project initiation, a survey and an in-depth group interview guide that evaluates (or follows up on) the co-production process in the middle of the project, and a group interview guide that evaluates (or follows up on) the impacts generated by the co-production at the end of the project. We are also working on a study that focuses on understanding the tensions that can arise in co-produced projects. Tensions are inevitable in co-produced research. The aim is to learn from these experiences and analyze how they have been handled in order to enable progress. Through the study, we want to support researchers and collaboration partners to facilitate more effective joint work.
What is the key challenge right now?
There is no right way to conduct co-production in research. All sub-projects in UserInvolve have designed their co-production processes in different ways. It is an advantage to be able to gather knowledge and experience from different approaches, but it is also a challenge to evaluate this diversity in a coherent and comprehensive way.
Who will benefit most from the results?
Researchers who are curious about how to conduct research through co-production, researchers who are already conducting research through co-production, and user organizations, regions, municipalities, and government agencies that want to learn more about how to co-produce to achieve better results in psychiatry, social psychiatry, and other mental health interventions.
