Avoiding the involvement overdose: Drugs,race,ethnicity and participatory research practice

Introduction

Debates about involvement in, and control of, research have been prevalent in many fields. These include disability, mental health, children and young people, drugs, and race and ethnicity. This paper focuses on drugs, race and ethnicity although some of the issues have relevance to other agendas. Whilst there has been an expansion of theoretically and empirically oriented writing on the subjects of race and racism over several decades (Back and Solomos, 2000; Clarke, 2003; Gunaratnam, 2003; Lewis, 2000; Nichols, 2009; Riggs and Augoustinos, 2005), the field of drugs, race and ethnicity is small and most research has been conducted in the last 20 years. Much of the UK research has sought to understand the particular or distinct drug-related issues of ethnically defined non-white population groups. The general picture emerging from this literature suggests that different minority ethnic populations are either especially vulnerable or especially resistant to drug use, drug problems or accessing support and services (Fountain, Bashford and Winters, 2003; UK Drug Policy Commission, 2010).

In the 1990s and early 2000s a series of accusations of institutional racism in the public sector emerged in England (Modood, 2007). As a result research which explored the influence of race and ethnicity on social problems, service uptake and service experience became viewed as necessary but also highly sensitive and political. Some academics put forward compelling arguments in support of the need for participatory research (PR) strategies in researching minoritized populations around sensitive issues such as illegal drugs (Winters and Patel, 2003). An example of how these arguments have been developed is provided by a paper written by Fountain, Patel and Buffin (2007) in which the authors describe histories of research in which academic outsiders ‘parachute’ into minoritized communities, grab some data and disappear to write and build their careers. The arguments suggested PR was vital in developing useful new knowledge on these subjects to inform policy and practice.

The attraction of PR approaches for public bodies is in part that they seem to offer an opportunity to hear more directly the views of population groups they have historically found it hard to reach, hard to understand or easy to ignore, thus seeming to provide access to a more authentic community voice. The ideals of PR appear to embody the current political vision of rational, independent, autonomous and agentic citizens. However, PR strategies have emerged from the confluence of many different influences, agendas and interest groups and the modes of PR used in the UK in the last twenty years have been influenced by a range of contributory factors. These include post-structuralist critiques of professional expertise, the post-neoliberal dislike of professionals, the activity of sectional interest and advocacy groups, agendas around community development, community engagement and/or community cohesion, rational choice theory and consumerism. The importance of this very mixed, and sometimes conflicted, parentage is that PR is constructed as a discourse which produces a field of tensions from which many potential problems arise. Hence, there are important questions about how involvement in research is viewed by different groups. Some may see PR as a form of consultation, some as a mode of emancipation, some as a developmental opportunity, some as a political activity, some as a mode of articulating needs and others as a more traditional enterprise in generating new knowledge. A lack of clarity about the primary objectives within specific projects might reflect PR’s complex and contradictory parentage and the fact that, in some examples, it has become inextricably intertwined with government consultation.

Shakespeare (1997) suggests that emancipatory research can tend to be dismissed by government and policy makers as contaminated by ideological prejudice. My interest in this paper is in the reverse idea, that is, in asking how PR changes when it is commissioned by statutory bodies and to what extent this alters the structure, the power, the relationships and what those who conduct the research feel they can see and say about their own communities (Roy, 2011). Hence, a central discussion in the paper is about the modes of participation employed in PR on these subjects. I ask questions which include: What is participation in research meant to achieve? And what influence do the degree and mode of participation have on projects?

In the paper I focus in detail on one PR programme commissioned by the Department of Health to understand the drug service issues and needs of a number of different – ethnically defined – communities (Bashford, Buffin and Patel, 2003; Fountain et al., 2007). I have chosen to focus on this programme for several reasons. One, because the 154 studies completed within it make it the largest programme of research to date in this emerging field. Two, because the programme was commissioned by a statutory body and administered by a university and hence is useful in exploring the implications of these issues for PR programmes. And three, because I was involved in the programme for several years and hence have a detailed understanding and experience of it.

Describing modes and methods of participation in research

There is extensive literature which describes the characteristics of participatory action research (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2005), participatory research (Healy, 2001; Williams, 2007), service user research (McLaughlin, 2010) and community engagement research (Fountain et al., 2007; Winters and Patel, 2003). Space will not allow a detailed treatment of this literature in this paper. However, some description of the different types of participation in research is necessary to provide a context to the later discussion.

Several authors conceptualize different forms of PR in terms of a continuum, essentially working from Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of participation to describe various levels of involvement in research from minimal or tokenistic through to complete control (Hanley, 2005; McLaughlin, 2010). I suggest that a more useful way of understanding the issues I describe in this paper is in terms of a matrix as set out in Figure 1. In the text below I describe the quadrants from the matrix in terms of four imaginary case examples. In the discussion I will focus in detail on an example of a quadrant D type model, but, as a comparison, will offer an example of another project which fits within quadrant C.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A typology of approaches to participatory research

Quadrant A: Vertically-driven/outside-in – non-participatory methods

A Drug and Alcohol Action Team (DAAT) commissions an academic school to examine steroid use amongst South Asian men. The DAAT plans to use the research findings to inform the treatment planning process and as part of an Equality Impact Assessment. The academics have previous experience of researching drug use amongst South Asian populations. South Asian community organizations have been approached by the DAAT to form a reference group for the research but there will be no involvement in designing or delivering the research and the findings will be the property of the DAAT.

Quadrant B: Horizontally-driven/co-produced – non-participatory methods

Funding is provided by a research council for a community organization to recruit an academic team to enhance the evidence base around a drug-related social enterprise it has developed. The organization is keen to develop new knowledge which meets the requirements of academic credibility and the research tasks require specialist knowledge it does not have. The organization commissions the researchers, co-produces the research design but does not participate in fieldwork. However, it owns the data and makes decisions about the dissemination strategy.

Quadrant C: Horizontally-driven/co-produced – participatory methods

Funding is provided by a research council for a community organization to collaborate with an academic team around a project exploring emerging drug issues in the community. The initial focus is to develop a process to recognize and then interrupt the unequal power dynamic between academics and other communities of interest. The focus on power sharing means that the community organization will choose the research questions, the research paradigms, the design and methodology and will control and direct the project and contribute to data collection. It will also own the data and decide on any dissemination strategy.

Quadrant D: Vertically-driven/outside-in – participatory methods

A statutory body commissions an academic institution to deliver a community research programme to examine the substance misuse service needs of minority ethnic communities. The programme involves a selection process. Community organizations submit applications and are interviewed by university staff. Funding is provided by the statutory body and accredited training in research methods is provided by the university to those who are recruited. Community groups can choose which methods they wish to use but must operate within the defined parameters of the programme which are decided by the funding organization. Community groups are required to produce an academic style report. The commissioners commit to consulting with community groups about the findings but retain the overall power to decide on subsequent actions.

Making and unmaking ‘natives’ in PR: ‘Insiders’, ‘outsiders’ and ‘in-betweeners’

In a chapter entitled ‘Writing Race’ Claire Alexander (2004: 135–136) discusses her experience of trying to get an article, which questioned the persistently negative portrayal of Asian communities in Britain, published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. She describes how the features editor changed her mind about the piece after a face-to-face meeting at which she realized, for the first time, that the writer was Asian. During subsequent correspondence the editor described the piece as ‘too positive and unrealistic, and … too subjective’ and suggested she had become ‘too close’ to the subject matter. For Alexander, the editor’s response suggested she had viewed her as:

Too ‘native’ to be professional, too close to be objective, and altogether just too ‘Asian’.

In contrast to Alexander’s experience, one compelling argument made in support of PR emerges from stories of academic outsiders who parachute into minoritized communities, grab some data and disappear (Fountain et al., 2007). In support of these views, some Black community researchers have suggested that academic-led research tends to give lip service to notions of action (Hanley, 2005). Academic sensitivity to such views may emerge from awareness of the colonial history of anthropology and social science in which non-white Others, and their communities, have been the sites of research activity under the gaze of the supposedly uninvolved, impartial, objective and usually white outsider. Of course, it is no longer the case that the great majority of scholars conducting social science research about race and ethnicity are white (Bulmer and Solomos, 2004). However, a number of papers on delivering PR with minoritized communities support the need for community participation in all aspects of the research process (Hanley, 2005), for community-led research (Fountain et al., 2007) and for reciprocity in research relations (Culley, Hudson and Rapport, 2007). Some projects have made deliberate use of insider strategies in which minority ethnic community members are seen as providing access to research respondents and privileged insight into community concerns about sensitive issues (Winters and Patel, 2003).

I have been involved with a number of PR programmes commissioned by statutory organizations. One example is the Department of Health funded Black and Minority Ethnic Community – Drug Misuse Needs Assessment Programme originally commissioned in 2000. The programme sought to develop a better understanding of substance misuse issues and service needs of a range of – ethnically defined – minority communities in England. In total 154 separate research projects were completed by community groups over three phases of the programme and further programmes using similar methods were subsequently commissioned by the Home Office and the Welsh Assembly Government. A detailed description of the structure and method of this programme is set out in two publications (Fountain et al., 2007; Winters and Patel, 2003). The authors describe the objective of creating an environment in which communities and agencies can work together – on an equal basis – to address an issue of mutual concern. They also suggest that the research should benefit the communities which are being studied. In the programme individuals from target communities were recruited by the university, trained in research methods and given regular support by a university staff member throughout the research process. Explicit attempts were also made to involve local agencies responsible for commissioning, planning and delivering services although Winters and Patel (2003) suggest this strategy was more successful in some projects than others.

The project fits within quadrant D of the matrix because it was commissioned by a statutory body and academics administered and managed it. Also because each project produced a research report which was given to local commissioners who retained the power to decide how to act upon the findings. The reports from the individual projects tended to articulate the specific needs of each ethnically based community and, in some cases, the findings from a number of projects have subsequently been collated into overview documents (for example Fountain, 2009).

Despite the broadly positive intent of the programme, the methodology used raises a number of issues of concern in relation to research on this subject. The programme approaches the subject of drugs, race and ethnicity by focussing its recruitment strategy around the pursuit of groups defined by a single characteristic (membership of a minority ethnic community). This is problematic because the membership of a minority ethnic community is merely one of many subject positions that individuals might assume and fails to consider the central issue of drug user status. This implicitly treats ethnically defined communities as homogeneous units defined by shared internal characteristics and neatly marked external boundaries (Wetherell, 2008: 303). It assumes that the drug-related issues of ethnic minorities are best decoded by – ethnically defined – insiders who are then expected to translate for an outside audience (Lewis, 2000: 120).

Outside of the substance misuse field, Alam and Husband (2006) have engaged more critically with these methodological issues in research which sought to communicate the experiences and narratives of being a Bradford man of Pakistani and Muslim heritage. Whilst using a community insider strategy they paid great attention to the process by which trust was generated in the research, defining process, reflection and critical scrutiny as central to data validity. In doing so they move well beyond the ‘crude’ notion that the assumed sameness of the insider researcher was sufficient to gain access to the truth. As they observe in relation to Alam’s role as the researcher:

M. Y. Alam is a Bradford-born member of the community that is the focus of the research. He is a peer of those who have participated in the research. He has an ‘insider’s’ credentials, insight and communicative facility in building a relationship between the researcher and researched. But he is not a representative of this ethnic population, which is itself internally fragmented. This is a conflictual research role that has its own acknowledged problems. (Alam and Husband, 2006: 22, italic in original)

Similarly, Alexander (2004: 145) describes a research setting in which she examined an all-male youth group in South East London who classed themselves as Bengali and Muslim. In the research Alexander charts how the young men engaged with representations about them in constructing identities. She describes her status in this setting as both an ‘insider’ – of sorts – and an academic, emphasizing a space of liminality or in-betweeness. However, she suggests that neither status offered a golden ticket to insight or truth. Rather the richness of her understandings emerged through time spent in the field and the energy and emotion invested in building complex and trusting relationships as the following quote highlights:

While I would acknowledge that my identification as ‘Asian’ facilitated my access initially, it was neither a sufficient nor simple foundation for the relationships that emerged later. Nor were these relationships based on ideas of shared ‘culture’, but on a less tangible set of alliances and hard-won mutual trust and affection.

The above examples emphasize that considerations about the methodologies and the constitution of research teams for PR projects which explore issues such as drugs, race and ethnicity are important and yet hard to pin down. The idea of a community of insiders who research one another might be attractive not least because it appears to simplify certain research tasks (for example recruiting community researchers). However, Taylor (2010: 377) emphasizes the methodological problem of assuming that categories and groupings offer access to something concrete, coherent and homogeneous referring to the notion of ‘crude identities’. For example, he criticizes the simple acceptance of an homogeneous deaf community, suggesting this is a community in which many Black and minority ethnic people experience systematic racism. Hence I argue that PR approaches, such as the one described above, which recruit on the assumption of ethnic sameness (for example Elam and Chinouya, 2000; Winters and Patel, 2003), may gain access to communities which are more imagined than real. As Alexander, Edwards and Temple (2007: 786–788) suggest, whilst imagined communities may link to ideals of homogeneity and national identity, the more useful notion of personal communities engages with the ways in which people live, construct and enact community in their daily lives. They argue that ethnic ‘communities’ are best understood as arising out of systems of localized ‘personal’ networks of friends, family and neighbourhood. These create complex contours in which individual, familial, local and collective/ethnic identities are performed and negotiated, within and across the boundaries of ‘community’ itself (p. 786). These notions challenge the reified and abstract ideas of top-down imposed ‘imagined communities’ and instead encourage us to think about the individual and contextual performance of community and belonging.

The experiences and reflections of Alam and Husband (2006), Alexander (2004) and Alexander, Edwards and Temple (2007) suggest that, despite broad agreement that forms of difference might influence field opportunities and interactions, there is less agreement on how such processes operate and to what effect in relation to the researcher’s fidelity in accounting for community concerns (Rhodes, 1994). Critically, the examples emphasize that these issues cannot be designed away at the start of projects but must be worked with throughout the research process. For example, Ochieng (2010) reflecting on the challenges for her as a Black researcher interviewing Black families, draws on the work of Serrant-Green (2002), emphasizing the conflicts and contradictions which inhere in her role as a researcher and the fluidity and liminality of the space she occupied (and indeed co-created). In contrast, PR strategies which uncritically adopt forms of racial matching seem to assume that under certain conditions (in this case ethnic or racial sameness) participants can and will ‘tell it like it is’ offering research results which are more objective, truthful or authentic (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000: 8). Modes of PR which engage solely on this basis essentialize racial categories before any encounter with research participants takes place (Gunaratnam, 2003). The overriding message emerging from this discussion is that, as with other approaches to research, PR cannot be freed from critical analysis of methods, including researcher reflexivity.

PR in practice: Avoiding the involvement overdose

I now develop the discussion about methodology and method by considering four issues: the ways in which PR projects are financed, commissioned and structured, the motives of different organizations and groups for participating, the ways in which projects are designed and the methods and modes of involvement. I argue that all these issues can profoundly affect the orientation of individual projects, the locus of power within them and what community researchers might feel able to see and say about how issues such as drugs affect communities.

In a critical reflection of the characteristics of recent modes of user involvement in health and social care Cowden and Singh (2007) describe the emergence of a new hegemony, one in which the system is ‘driven by managerial rather than democratizing imperatives’ (p. 20):

… the story we are being told … is that in the bad old days Users would simply be told what to do by Professionals, whereas now there are all sorts of opportunities Users have for being involved in the services which are after all, run in their interest. This story is in fact imaginary because the decisions about how Users can and should be involved are all controlled by professionals on one hand, and by the government and welfare bureaucracy on the other; the latter in particular have control over finance, which is crucial in all of these situations. (p. 18)

For Cowden and Singh (2007: 15–16) the recent proliferation of user involvement is characterized by top-down rather than bottom-up modes of participation. They suggest that, within these structures, the voice of the user has become something of a fetish ‘held up as a representative of authenticity and truth’ but seldom having any ‘real influence over decision making’. Beresford (2002) suggests the existence of a parallel process within PR in which it is increasingly seen in technical rather than political and action oriented terms and Torre (2009: 111) suggests that, at its worst, PR has become no more than a strategy to co-opt knowledge in the name of participation.

I want to discuss three important issues in relation to the outcomes of the Black and Minority Ethnic Community – Drug Misuse Needs Assessment Programme which in my experience were affected by elements of its structure. First, minority ethnic drug users were very seldom included as community researchers despite the subject being substance misuse. This may be because researchers were recruited through community organizations. As one Drug and Alcohol Action Team Commissioner expressed to me in a recent interview, ‘Larger representational community groups are political and can be precariously balanced. This can make them easier to find but more difficult to work through’. The result in this case appeared to be that drug users were not being engaged as equivalent citizens whose ideas and input were considered necessary to developing new understandings on these issues. Instead, they often became the material ‘objects’ of the programmes which communities worked on in their research. Additionally, many of the reports described minority ethnic communities as having low levels of understanding and awareness of drugs and drug issues, the implication being that they were much lower than those of white populations. No similar research was undertaken with white populations. However, it seems tenable that if research had been conducted within white populations using similar methods, low levels of awareness and understanding of these issues may also have been reported by many people. One problem with looking at minority ethnic populations as isolated units is that it becomes more difficult to know whether the issues reported might be the same as or different to those experienced by other groups.

Second, and as a result of the recruitment strategy, many of the research reports completed within the programme ascribed issues to broadly defined groups in relation to drug use, drug services and other forms of support (Roy, 2011). The focus on what was shared across these groups may well have masked important differences within them and therefore the findings may be of limited use in understanding sub-groups (for example geographical, religious) and developing viable intervention strategies. This is a concern because local investigations suggest that there are large differences in patterns of drug use within broad groupings such as, for example, South Asian (UK Drug Policy Commission, 2010).

Third, many of the reports seemed to assign different characteristics to those who used drugs. For example, a summary of the sixty-five South Asian community engagement research projects from the programme (Fountain, 2009) included the following statement:

Illicit drug use amongst young South Asians (particularly those born in the UK) is seen to result from the communities becoming ‘more westernised’ as their adherence to traditional South Asian culture lessens, especially in relation to the preservation of family respect and behaving according to religious principles. (p. 5, italic in original)

There was obviously felt to be sufficient evidence across the sixty-five constituent reports to justify inclusion of these observations in the summary document. However, there are two ways one could view a statement such as this. The first is to accept that it ‘tells it how it is’, accepting it as some sort of statement of ‘reality’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). The second is to see those who undertook the work as seeking to separate their communities from an attachment to drugs; instead, presenting the findings in ways which differentiated those from their communities who were drug users by assigning ideas of ‘western-ness’ to them. A good deal of – mainly American – scholarship has demonstrated strong race-based discourses in relation to drugs in which there is a tendency to locate the cause of drug problems within racialized minorities and to view the drug use of those with darker skins as inherently more problematic, dangerous and in need of control (Murji, 1999). In essence many of the reports from this programme were operating the same ‘othering’ process, identified by Karim Murji (1999), but in reverse.

The question is why should those who undertook these research projects have been so keen to position the cause of drug issues outside of their own communities, particularly given the focus of the projects? Though it is easy to suggest that this might be another facet of the oft reported (although poorly evidenced) suggestion that stigma about drug issues is more prevalent within minority ethnic communities than in white communities (UK Drug Policy Commission, 2010), it is equally tenable that elements of the structure of the programme made people less keen to see or discuss difficult issues and in particular influenced the ways in which they sought to present issues to an outside audience. It is important to remember that in this programme communities were largely involved as researchers with the findings passed – in the form of written reports – to service commissioners. Clear attempts were made to link communities and commissioners throughout the process and commissioners would often consult with the community researchers about how to act on any recommendations. However, these linkages were more successfully developed in some projects than others and commissioners always retained the overall power to make decisions unilaterally (Winters and Patel, 2003). Hence it seems conceivable that some community researchers – many of whom were not themselves drug users – may have felt like agents within a vertically driven research agenda in which their communities remained the objects of study despite their own involvement.

Argyris (1977) suggests belief systems operate at both explicit and implicit levels within organizations. I argue that it is possible that the explicit programme rhetoric of agentic Black and minority ethnic communities dealing with difficult issues may have been reinterpreted by some who took part and manifested as Black and minority ethnic communities with problems. If true, it is possible that the tendency to split off drug users from the community and to locate the cause of drug problems outside of communities may have been a defensive response to this implicit belief about the programme. Certainly, the programme appears to have encouraged – and operated – a rather fixed and inward looking use of the notion of community in which the imagined community became idealized and where the causes of problems were located outside of it (Froggett, 2002; Hoggett, 2000). Hence, it seems that despite the clear emancipatory goals of the programme as a whole, elements of its structure and the attendant power dynamics (for example, that a great deal of power was held by academics and statutory organizations) may have been experienced as threatening rather than empowering by some who took part (Fawcett and Hearn, 2004).

In comparison to the above programme Mohatt et al. (2004) describe a culturally anchored participatory action research project addressing substance use issues undertaken with ‘Alaska natives’. In this project – which fits in quadrant C of the matrix – the structure was horizontal and the academics and various communities of interest became co-producers of the methodology and the methods which were directly linked to the praxis. The authors suggest that the success of the project was based on developing a space for shared reflection in which the knowledge was co-created and decisions about subsequent action and dissemination taken by all those who constituted communities of concern. As the authors suggest:

At a very simple level, both groups had to learn how to listen and respond in ways that showed respect, and built trust and consensus and are communicatively competent. … It is a mutual responsibility for both community and university co-researchers. But given the history of oppression and colonization, much of the responsibility falls first on the university researchers. (p. 272)

In this programme, the decision to foreground the power differences between academics and communities of interest is of crucial importance and the authors emphasize the need to situate the researcher and the research within the community moment by moment. Mohatt et al. (2004) emphasize a situation in which all those involved in PR projects (funders, academics, gatekeepers, community organizations, community researchers) have agency and choice, but in an environment in which they have very different levels of power, different stakes in the process and very different forms of knowledge. In the previous example by comparison (Winters and Patel, 2003) academics had chosen to foreground the power dynamic between statutory bodies and marginalized communities but had positioned themselves as external facilitators who were independent from these dynamics. This seems to idealize the role of academics and to negate their stake in the projects and power in the process.

One problem with vertically driven PR programmes is that they may be more likely to feel like superficial and technical exercises for community members. This is, in part, because these programmes have to meet the objectives of statutory bodies as well as, and possibly in preference to, those of other participants. The concern is that PR with these characteristics may appear to be a form of impression management in which policy makers, with academic support, perform involvement rather than contributing to the creation of opportunities for transformation and change at a local level (Hoggett, 2010). These criticisms have been levelled extensively at academic-led research (quadrant A) but may be equally relevant to vertically driven PR (quadrant D). If true, community activists who have previously identified research fatigue within certain communities may begin to view PR through similarly disillusioned lenses. Ultimately, it is the confusion of PR’s different structures that can lead to dishonest practice, defensiveness and frustration or disappointment for those who take part.

This raises important and difficult questions which include: How should PR be structured and initiated? What is the appropriate role of the academic researcher? What forms of expertise and knowledge are prioritized? What skills and training are necessary in preparing researchers (both academic and community)? And, who should decide upon the above issues? I argue that vertically driven PR has a number of limitations. These relate to the difficulties of balancing the different motives for involvement, potential benefits and the power imbalances. For community organizations which are sometimes used to host vertically driven projects the attractions can be about drawing in funds, providing opportunities for local people and promoting the organization’s role and influence in the local civic space. On the other hand, for novice researchers in these programmes the benefits may be about accessing training, the solidarity or enjoyment of taking part in a community programme or accessing the financial or other benefits attached to a specific project. One view is that for academics the benefits of PR in general might be limited, slow to emerge and hard to predict, all things which do not sit well with notions of career progression. This said, and in line with wider debates about the paradoxes of empowerment (Baistow, 1994), academics have become central to the administration and delivery of these practices and many have benefitted significantly by engaging in and writing about them.

Conclusions

In concluding I want to consider the implications of the above discussion for designing participatory approaches to researching drugs, race and ethnicity in ways which might challenge and alter dominant relations, thinking and behaviour. Whilst some argue that PR programmes exploring the needs of ethnically based communities have provided an opportunity for minoritized researchers to enter into knowledge production (Fountain et al., 2007), the picture may not be so simple. For example, Alexander (2004) identifies that the idea that raced or ethnicized subjects should be studied by raced or ethnicized researchers may actually operate as a straitjacket for minoritized researchers denying them the academic freedom allowed to most white researchers to study whomsoever they like.

Methodologically, many horizontally driven PR projects have already dispensed with the application of simplistic insider-outsider approaches (Mohatt et al., 2004; Nichols, 2009). For example, in recognition that the notion of topic threat might be complex, nuanced and differentially interpreted by different ‘Alaskan natives’, Mohatt et al. (2004) offered potential participants choice about where they were interviewed and who they wanted to be interviewed by (by a male or female, someone from their own village or culture or someone outside). This strategy recognizes that it is hard to predict in advance who someone might prefer to discuss an issue like substance use with. These more nuanced, flexible and co-created PR strategies provide the opportunity to research the ways in which people interpret, enact and live ‘substance use’, ‘community’ and ‘difference’ in specific contexts, interrupting the empirical reliance on binaries and the related separation between minoritized people and the white majority.

Adopting PR strategies offers no methodological shortcut to the development of useful understandings about drugs, diversity and difference (Mohatt et al., 2004). In fact, done well, PR often takes much longer and costs much more, for reasons which include the unpredictability of the research process and the overall direction of travel. Whilst the involvement of community researchers might alter the dynamics of research and might be seen as part of a democratizing process from which local people can benefit (Hanley, 2005), PR does not unproblematically guarantee better data, improved understandings (McLaughlin, 2010), democratizing processes within communities (Elam and Chinouya, 2000) or power-free relations between academics, communities and statutory bodies (Mohatt et al., 2004). Also, vertically driven programmes have different masters when compared to their horizontally driven counterparts and this alters the primary objectives of the programmes, overall control of the process, and, crucially, funding.

It is important to move beyond the notion that all that is required to solve the problems of PR is more involvement in fieldwork. In the discussion I have demonstrated that, in vertically driven PR, the practices of involvement may be experienced by community researchers as having both regulatory as well as emancipatory potential (Baistow, 1994). The structure of PR programmes can influence who is included and excluded and what might be seen and said about difficult issues. Where communities are largely involved as researchers with the findings passed to statutory bodies to decide if and how to act upon them, it is conceivable that community researchers may feel like agents within research agendas in which their communities remain the objects of study despite their own involvement.

It is reasonable to make the case for PR designs in which participation occurs to different degrees and in different stages of the research process including some parts where there is no participation (McLaughlin, 2010). This may happen because people express more interest in certain elements of a project, because some of those who take part have certain skill sets or forms of knowledge others don’t have or because certain projects prioritize particular objectives over others. Local interest groups, advocacy bodies and/or communities can control the funds, design and management of projects without taking part in data collection. It is possible that in some circumstances this model of involvement may be more progressive and beneficial than models in which involvement is principally restricted to fieldwork. This is because controlling the research agenda, finance, data and dissemination provides a lot more power than simply conducting fieldwork as any novice academic researcher knows well. However, of most importance, is for projects to clarify the types and levels of participation that are on offer, or better still to negotiate these at the outset.

My concern is that the context in which PR has grown in popularity in recent years has meant that the rhetoric of PR programmes has sometimes not met the reality. Those academics that pursue PR strategies and those organizations which fund them should be transparent – and preferably flexible – about the primary objectives of a programme and the process. Commissioners and funders must be honest about the limitations of involvement and the likelihood that a programme may change elements of policy and practice. For example, if community researchers will be consulted about the implementation of findings but ultimate decisions will remain with commissioners this should be made clear at the outset. Without these commitments vertically driven PR, commissioned by statutory bodies, might simply be experienced as an exercise in simulation or a form of impression management, in which statutory bodies and academics are seen as performing involvement in pursuit of their own ends (Hoggett, 2010). PR with these characteristics will be part of the problem perpetuating racism, exclusion and discrimination rather than part of the solution and communities that have previously reported research fatigue may now begin to report an overdose of involvement.