Engaging Communities and Service Users

Context, Themes and Methods

Billie Oliver, Bob Pitt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230363076
• eBook ISBN: 9781350313354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Across the range of social care, health and welfare professions, it is essential that students and practitioners engage meaningfully with the communities and service users they work with. This book offers a timely and practical guide to the methods and skills related to forming and developing such partnerships. Helping both aspiring and experienced practitioners to empower communities and service users, this book: - Explores how the developing roles of communities and service users influence policy, services and practice - Highlights the different ethical, power and boundary tensions when working with communities and service users and suggests ways to overcome them - Provides examples, case studies, activities and useful resources which help illustrate ways and methods of empowering people and enabling their voices to be heard An accessible and wide-ranging book, Engaging Communities and Service Users is a must have text for students and practitioners in social care, health and welfare.

PART I

Context

CHAPTER 1

Introducing Concepts and Meanings

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you should have an understanding of:

some of the key terminology and theoretical models that can help us to understand and analyse approaches to participation and engagement;

some of the developments in thinking that have influenced approaches to engaging with communities and service users;

some of the critiques and analyses that highlight the contested themes covered later in this book;

useful resources to improve knowledge and practice;

guidance on how to make effective use of this book.

Introduction

The ideas and content in this book have emerged from our experience of working with students on a range of both undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes across social care, education and health. Our teaching experience has been with students on programmes of study ranging from community and youth work, social work, community and public health, mental health and work with children, young people and families. Increasingly, today, students and practitioners from a range of health, welfare and social care professions are being required to involve the people and communities with whom they work in decisions that affect them. As a result, a patchwork of practices has emerged, often all grouped under the same, seemingly commonly understood, label. It has been our experience that students and practitioners often struggle to understand the complexity behind this seemingly straightforward terminology and as a consequence engage in often limited critical evaluation of their practice.

Our own experience as practitioners has been in community settings as community engagement and community education workers. As such we have direct experience of the complexities of policy and practice and of often firmly held differences in perspective and theoretical orientation between and within professional groupings. A key focus for us, in our teaching and in our writing, has always been to encourage engagement with a discourse that sets user involvement within a framework of community engagement and away from an individual case management model, currently so prevalent in a lot of practice with which we are familiar. Community engagement approaches to user involvement are essentially concerned with working to find ways to involve people with others to achieve positive change in their lives. However, when attempting to introduce this framework into our teaching we have found that we frequently have to ‘back-track’ and engage in a process of unpicking the complex and contested ideas upon which this approach is built. In our experience, students encountering constructs of community and participation for the first time, especially from a perspective of attempting to theorise their practice, do not find it easy to engage with some of the existing texts presenting political analyses of community and community empowerment. As a consequence their ability to analyse policy and practice is weakened.

How to use this book

Our aim with this book is to commence with a broad focus that reflects on some of the contested constructs of engagement and participation with individuals, groups and communities and to build a framework for understanding and analysing community practice and community engagement. For us, the key word in the title of this book is engaging. We offer an approach that explores complex and contested concepts to which the study of engagement with people and communities gives rise. In so doing, our aim is to extend readers’ understanding of theories, skills and issues in practice and to help students and practitioners to articulate and evaluate their work. To do this we draw on contemporary reflective and practice-based activities and resources to engage the reader in ideas and policy debates that we introduce and to stimulate your capacity to critically explore the conceptual ideas. The chapters all attempt to illustrate the practical application of those ideas through case studies from a range of practice using both UK and international examples. At the end of each chapter we include resources that you might use. Throughout the text there are activities to help you to extend your theoretical and practical understanding. In each chapter you will be encouraged to consider how you might progress your learning further and to reflect on your progress and development. Each chapter aims to move beyond a superficial understanding and help you begin to engage with the complexity in more depth and to develop your own emergent analyses and critiques.

This book is aimed, primarily, at students and student practitioners in fields of study across social care, welfare and health and will be of direct relevance to those on practice-orientated programmes. However, we hope that it will also be useful as a resource for students on applied social sciences and social policy courses and practitioners working in human services who might be interested in deconstructing some of the principles behind the study of community and user engagement.

The book is structured into ten chapters within three parts: Context, Themes and Methods. Each of the chapters makes links between engaging communities and service users, and includes contemporary debates, case studies and practice examples. We have not written this book with the belief that you will start at Chapter 1 and read through the book in a sequential manner. We expect, and hope, that you will move between chapters and make conceptual links between some of the ideas and themes covered. As you will note when you read the later chapters in this book, there is a frequent overlap and connection between the themes and concepts covered. However, by breaking the themes and methods into separate chapters we aim to offer a starting point that will guide you to begin to engage with some quite complex ideas. The conceptual frameworks outlined in this first chapter will be further explored, analysed and applied in the chapters that follow. They are introduced, initially as a way to help you begin to think about some of the complexity behind seemingly simple ideas and policies.

This first chapter outlines and begins to critique some of the attempts to define the constructs of community, service user, engagement and participation. We also begin to consider the impact of the developing role of the service user over the past 30 years in influencing policy, services, practice and community. In Chapter 2 we will build on the contextualising concepts covered in this chapter to consider how some of these ideas have been embraced and interpreted by policy makers and politicians. An interesting question to ask yourself as you read the next chapter will be to consider the extent to which policy drives practice or practice drives policy.

Chapters 3 to 5 further build on the conceptual frameworks and theoretical models outlined in this chapter and on the policy trends explored in Chapter 2 to develop an analysis of theories and practice of association, citizenship and community capacity building. Chapter 6 will then progress to a consideration of some of the ethical and professional boundary dilemmas that can arise when working closely with communities and service users. Chapters 7 and 8 summarise some of the methods and approaches often associated with participatory practice with communities and service users, such as informal education, social pedagogy, advocacy and mentoring. Case studies and practical examples illustrate ways of empowering people to be involved in decision making and present methods to facilitate their voices being heard. Chapter 9 will also apply theoretical analyses to the practice of participatory evaluation and research. Finally, Chapter 10 concludes with an exploration of what can be concluded about the future direction of travel and outlines our framework for understanding and analysing community practice and engagement. It outlines developments in the political arena and invites the reader to reflect on some recent initiatives. The final chapter provides an overview of some of the practice contexts that have emerged, and are still emerging, as a result of the policy agendas outlined in the book.

ACTIVITY 1.1

Engaging with this book

Our aim in writing this book is to present an accessible starting point that enables engagement with some of the complex and contested concepts that the study of engagement with service users and communities gives rise to. We want you the reader to engage with some of these ideas and to participate in thinking about how they apply to your own experience and practice. This activity is designed to get you started!

Choose a chapter that, on skimming through the book, seems to be of particular interest to you. Skim read the chapter to make brief notes to identify the following:

A key policy or political initiative that illustrates the chapter’s focus.

A theory or model presented that resonates with your experience.

A case study or example that you could apply to your own practice.

A useful resource or an item of further reading to look up and from which to make notes.

Attempting definitions

Our discussion, in this chapter, introduces some historical perspectives and traditions that have influenced practice and policy. Many of these themes will be built on and extended in the chapters that follow. Our intention in this first chapter is to enable you to begin developing a conceptual framework for analysing and critiquing some of the policy and practice you will be exposed to throughout the book and beyond, in your own practice. There have been numerous attempts to define community and mostly these have led to the development of typologies that commonly refer to communities of attachment, identity, interest and affiliation. In Chapter 2, we explore how policy often has a tendency to conflate these meanings leading not only to confusion about what is meant, but also to confusion over the aim of particular interventions. When we attempt to look for definitions of community and service user we encounter the elusive nature of them as conceptual constructs. They begin to appear imprecise, contradictory and controversial. Both terms tend to be imbued with evaluative or ideological associations.

ACTIVITY 1.2

Defining community

What communities do you belong to? What does the word community mean to you? Try to map out for yourself a spider diagram that explores the range of communities you feel that you belong to.

Can you cluster these in a way that begins to identify different types of community or different meanings that the word holds for you?

Summarise some of these definitions and concepts.

What patterns do you note?

In attempting this activity you have probably experienced some tensions surrounding your different experiences of community. These tensions may well relate to whether, for you, the nature of community is objective or subjective, or whether you experience it as inclusive or exclusive.

ACTIVITY 1.3

Defining service user

Think about some of the communities that you identified in Activity 1.2.

Would you say that within any of these communities you could be labelled as a service user? Why do you say this?

What might be an alternative label for your role within each of these communities?

In much the same way that the concept of community is contested and endlessly debated, recent years have also witnessed an increasing attempt to critique the concept of service user. Dinham (2007, p.181) has suggested that there has been a tendency to use the words as ‘umbrella terms’ and as ‘hurrah words’. As with the pre-occupation with definitions of community, these debates are usually driven by competing ideological positions and shifting values. As others have pointed out (e.g. McLauglin, 2009, Braye, 2000), the meanings that we attribute to the words we use to describe our practice do not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Activities, Case Studies and Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Part I - Context
• Part II - Themes
• Part III - Methods
• Part IV - Conclusion
• References
• Index