Making user participation work - from policy to practice

During the last decades user participation has developed from being a radical term to becoming a well-established part of the health and social care system. However, the implementation of this policy and legislation is not unambiguous, but are framed within different welfare policy discourses with different implications for policy and welfare practice. By including different groups of service users (elderly people, persons with mental health problems and disabled people) as well as different user participation discourses attracted by and developed for different user groups, the project intends to present a comprehensive contribution to the discussion of how to create more holistic and democratic services. The project is built around three modules focusing on different questions,but still closely intertwined with the empirical object consisting of municipal welfare services. 1. Policy: How are the interpretations of users and user participation manifested in Norwegian policy documents concerning the three user groups? 2. Organisation and implementation: How do the different discourses for different user groups have implications for the organisation and the implementation of services directed towards them? 3. User participation in practice: 1) How do the employees as street level bureaucrats define user participation and what are their opportunities for realising user participation in day to day activities? 2) How do the different user groups perceive their opportunities or restrictions for user participation? The project will use a mixed methods approach like critical discourse analysis, case studies, personal and focus group interviews, observation, vignette methods and institutional ethnography. Representatives for the user groups will take part as co-reseachers in the different phases of the project.