3. A review of literature

The discussion among the project participants at transnational meetings revealed variations in the way that the literature should be reviewed, for example in terms focus, ranking order, search concepts, methodology and possible comprehensiveness of country reports. There were concerns about the expected magnitude of the relevant national literature. For these reasons guidelines were developed to provide a flexible, ‘middle way’ in searching the literature that could be applied to all partner countries and which would make it possible to analyze the national reports also from a comparative perspective. 

A number of core factors were important to explore: 

  • The ways in which participation of service users is a key challenge/complexity for social work professionals which required practitioners and educators to be reflexive, in order to establish answer the question: what do service users consider supportive? 
  • These challenges are relatively new to policy and practice in fields of social and health care, it was important to contribute to an analysis of how such ideas and practices are used by partner countries 
  • User participation may have varying meanings and take different forms, resulting in a variety of complex challenges, which may, or may not, be taken into consideration by researchers or practitioners. 

Against this background, the aims of the literature analysis were to provide a knowledge basis for university teachers, students and practitioners when learning about historical and contemporary differences (and deficits) in user participation approaches in social work research and practice in the partner countries. It was agreed that the interfaces between the social work and health care professionals would be of common interest to the project team, given the nature of their welfare regimes. According to the project plan an aim was to explore the literature in terms of a (self) critical, reflective approach to user participation in the development of services, also the degree and types of direct or indirect references to reflexivity in the reviewed literature, both by researchers themselves and within the types of user participation studied. Furthermore, the findings of the literature review was also meant to function as a source for students taking part in our later project activities, especially when identifying and/or reflecting on good practices on service user participation, for instance, by conducting case studies of their own. 

During project meetings, various types of approaches to reviewing the literature (Davies et al. 2019), for example systematic, scoping, integrative, and rapid reviews) were discussed. It was agreed that the most realistic way ahead seemed to be to conduct a ‘light variant’ of the type of scoping review described by Arkseys & O'Malley (2005). They described five stages in conducting a scoping review: Stage 1: identifying the research question; Stage 2: identifying relevant studies; Stage 3: study selection; Stage 4: charting the data Stage 5: collating, summarizing and reporting the results. These steps enabled the construction of a national report each participating university, as guided by the document in Appendix 1.