ArticleSociology of health & illness2022
The impossibility of engaged research: Complicity and accountability between researchers, 'publics' and institutions.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Facilitators of and barriers to patient and public involvement in mental health research within university settings: a systematic review and meta-synthesis.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Engaged Medical Humanities-A Framework for Knowledge Production in Research Collaborations.The Journal of medical humanities · 2026Article
- "I am there just to get on with it": a qualitative study on the labour of the patient and public involvement workforce.Health research policy and systems · 2024Article
- Create to Collaborate: using creative activity and participatory performance in online workshops to build collaborative research relationships.Research involvement and engagement · 2023Article
- Developing a Women's Thought Collective methodology for health research: The roles and responsibilities of researchers in the reflexive co-production of knowledge.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2023Article
- Co-ideation and co-design in co-creation research: Reflections from the 'Co-Creating Safe Spaces' project.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2023Article
- "And when will you install the new water pump?": disconcerted reflections on how to be a 'good' Global Health scholar.Globalization and health · 2023Article
- Community engagement to improve access to healthcare: a comparative case study to advance implementation science for transgender health equity.International journal for equity in health · 2022Article
- Exploring the mental health effects of Universal Credit: a journey of co-production.Perspectives in public health · 2022Article
- Co-production for or against the university: student loneliness and the commodification of impact in Covid-19.Qualitative research journal · 2022Article
- Article
- An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology.JBSP : the journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. British Society for Phenomenology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Over the past decade, U.K. universities have increasingly sought to involve publics in research as active participants in the construction of academic knowledge. Sociologists of health have largely welcomed this enthusiasm for engaged and participatory ways of working, including methodologies long in use in the field such as patient-led research and co-creation. Despite the strong interest in engaged research, however, we argue that funding patterns, bureaucratic structures and an overreliance on people employed on casual contracts make it extremely difficult, often impossible, to do engaged research in British universities. Drawing on our own experiences, we show how our attempts to practise and deepen accountability to variously situated publics were constrained by the way our institution imagined and materially supported engagement. We argue that it falls to individual researchers to mitigate or work around structural barriers to engagement, and that this process creates dilemmas of complicity. If engaged research is to fulfil its remit for inclusion and its radical potential, researchers need to think carefully about how the U.K. engagement agenda entwines with processes of casualisation, acceleration and projectification, and how institutional recuperations of engagement can undermine its political and epistemic objectives.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.