Reinforce chapter themes with free access to two journal articles for each chapter and further online readings. Select chapters will also include suggested weblinks.

Journal Article 21.1: Rose, D. (2013) ‘Patient and public involvement in health research: Ethical imperative and/or radical challenge?’, Journal of Health Psychology 19(1): 149–58.

Description: Patient and public involvement in health research, including mental health research, is promoted by research funders in England. However, it is poorly conceptualized. One argument is that patient and public involvement in research is an ethical imperative because those who research is for should have a stake in how it is done. This could be developed through concepts of citizenship and democratic science. More strongly, it can be argued that changing the knowledge producers will change knowledge itself. Starting with feminist standpoint epistemology, it is argued that a political conceptualization best captures the new knowledge that marginalized health groups can produce.

Journal Article 21.2: Gillard, S., Simons, L., Turner, K., Lucock, M. and Edwards. C. (2012) ‘Patient and public involvement in the co-production of knowledge: Reflection on the analysis of qualitative data in a mental health study’, Qualitative Health Research 22(8): 1126–37.

Description: 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.