Funding Proposal for "Partnership Research: Negotiating User Involvement in Research Design"

If you want to get some money to pay people to do research you usually have to write a research proposal. This describes what research you want to do and how you are going to do it. It will also say how much the work is going to cost. Funding proposals get sent out to groups or organizations that give money for research.

This document shows you an example of a funding proposal which has been made easier to read. This proposal asked for money to do ‘Partnership Research’ so that we could make this website. We got the money from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This project started as a much smaller project. You can find out about the smaller project in the proposal for ‘Our Home: Developing participative research methods with adults with learning disabilities’ (see Phase 1 funding proposal).

The Proposal:
Lots of research funders believe that service users should be more involved in research. Some examples are the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Department of Health and the National Lottery’s Big Lottery Fund. These organizations want to find out more about what service users really think. One way of doing this is by giving service users the chance to do research themselves with the support of other researchers.

This sounds like a very good idea. Everyone can learn together and learn more because they all know different things. At the same time, working in this way is new. And it can be difficult (see Partnerships: Questions and Challenges). Professional researchers who are already doing research need to learn more about how to work together with service users to do research instead of just doing research on service users. We call this sort of research ‘partnership research’. Doing partnership research means that service users join in all parts of the research.

In our work with service users, we have been trying to do partnership research. We have been working with lots of different groups to do this. We have been working together
with service users to think about important questions such as how do we share the research. We would like to have some research funding to carry on this work and to help other people think about how to do it.

If we can have some money to do this work we will run courses for other people. We will also make a website where people can learn about partnership research.