Section of Mental Health, Division of Population Health Sciences and Education, St George's, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Qual Health Res. 2012 Aug;22(8):1126-37. doi: 10.1177/1049732312448541. Epub 2012 Jun 6.
Patient and public involvement in health research is increasingly well established internationally, but the impacts of involvement on the research process are hard to evaluate. We describe a process of qualitative data analysis in a mental health research project with a high level of mental health service user and carer involvement, and reflect critically on how we produced our findings. Team members not from research backgrounds sometimes challenged academic conventions, leading to complex findings that would otherwise have been missing. An essential component of how we coproduced knowledge involved retaining methodological flexibility so that nonconventional research voices in the team could situate and critique what was conventionally known. Deliberate and transparent reflection on how "who we are" informed the knowledge we produced was integral to our inquiry. We conclude that reflecting on knowledge (co)production is a useful tool for evaluating the impact of patient and public involvement on health research.
患者和公众参与健康研究在国际上越来越得到认可，但参与对研究过程的影响难以评估。我们描述了一个心理健康研究项目中的定性数据分析过程，该项目有很高水平的心理健康服务使用者和照顾者的参与，并批判性地反思我们如何得出研究结果。非研究背景的团队成员有时会挑战学术惯例，从而产生复杂的发现，否则这些发现可能会缺失。我们共同产生知识的一个重要组成部分是保持方法的灵活性，以便团队中的非传统研究声音能够定位和批评传统上已知的内容。对“我们是谁”如何影响我们产生的知识进行深思熟虑和透明的反思，是我们研究的重要组成部分。我们得出结论，反思知识（共同）生产是评估患者和公众参与对健康研究影响的有用工具。
