Moving the participant into the analysis redistributes interpretive authority

Participatory research does not only collect from people: it changes who is allowed to interpret. This sixth of ten units argues that moving the participant from subject to co-analyst is a design decision that redistributes interpretive authority, because a participant who is the expert of their experience has a claim on the analysis. Participation in analysis is more often claimed than documented, so the account owes a reporting duty rather than a virtue: it must say which decisions the participants actually made. The five units before it settled how to gather and read.

Participation is a decision about power

Arnstein (1969) arranged citizen involvement in eight rungs, grouped as non-participation (manipulation, therapy), tokenism (informing, consultation, placation) and citizen power (partnership, delegated power, citizen control). Each rung measures how far citizens determine the plan or programme. The criterion is not how much people said. It is who decided.

Cornwall and Jewkes (1995) carried that criterion into health research, arguing that the key difference from conventional research lies in the location of power in the research process. The questions to ask are who defines the problem, who analyses it, and who owns and acts on what is produced. Bodker (1996) adds a condition the ladder is silent about. Participation requires material and organisational support, and conflicts of interest are a resource for design rather than an obstacle. A participation claim is tested on decisions and resources, not on meetings attended.

An invitation has levels, and most stop short of creating

Sanders and Stappers (2008) supply the honest limit on the invitation. They distinguish four levels of creativity in people's lives: doing, adapting, making and creating, which differ in the expertise and interest they demand. They argue that all people are creative, though not all become designers. The floor under that claim is material: a toolkit that assumes the literacy of written instructions, and a session held at an hour the participant has time to spare, decide who can take up the invitation. A participant who cannot see the sheet is outside the invitation altogether. Their worked case is a generative session in which nurses designed an ideal future patient room with a toolkit. The components were deliberately round, which pushed the group to think in activities rather than rooms.

Photovoice moves the first reading to the participants

Wang and Burris (1997) give the parallel case in research. Photovoice states three goals. People record and reflect their own community's strengths and concerns. Critical dialogue about the photographs is promoted in group discussion. The results are carried to policymakers. The camera moves part of the collection, and the first reading of the images, to the participants. It is more accurate to call it co-production of data with a shared first reading; the analytic decisions afterwards still have to be named.

The method was named after it had been used. The first photovoice project put cameras in the hands of village women in Yunnan, China, inside a development programme on women's health, and was then called photo novella (Wang, Burris and Ping, 1996). The photographs were used to reach people able to act on them. The warrant of the method therefore begins in one programme in one place, which is a narrower thing than a general claim about empowerment.

Participation has conditions, and the field under-reports them

Kensing and Blomberg (1998) review participatory design as a maturing research area, organised around three recurring issues: the politics of design, the nature of participation, and the methods and tools available for participating.

Halskov and Hansen (2015) counted. Their review covers all 102 research papers published at the Participatory Design Conferences between 2002 and 2012, and sorts them into five categories of contribution. They then describe how participation is defined and how it is conducted, and report significant diversity in the practice of participation. That diversity matters: a unit that treats participatory research as one method with one standard is describing a founding ideal, not a field. Wacnik, Daly and Verma (2025) repeat the count on a newer corpus and reach the same verdict, finding the term less rigidly defined as its use has grown, across fourteen techniques.

The preposition separates participatory design from user-centred work

Spinuzzi (2005) sets out the methodology. Participatory design involves three broad stages, an initial exploration of work, discovery processes, and prototyping. Its difference from user-centred design is a preposition: user-centred work may be done on behalf of users, whereas participatory design must be done with them, and its criteria include continual involvement rather than a listening tour.

Heron and Reason (1997) make the claim philosophical rather than procedural. Their participatory inquiry paradigm rests on an extended epistemology of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing. If knowing is collaborative by construction, then the participant is a knower rather than a source, and the question of who analysed the data is the wrong kind of question. That is the position the reporting obligation has to answer.

The decision log co-analysis needs has not been produced

Greenberg (2025) is the most direct recent statement. Critical participatory co-analysis has participants interpret data, not only generate it. It aims at multivocal findings, and at a validity that centres the humanity of both researcher and participant. The paper's own demand is this unit's obligation: the researcher must document which analytic decisions the participants made.

Bratteteig and Wagner (2016) show why that documentation is hard to produce. Their analysis of participation as decision-making across four participatory design projects follows Schon's account of design as creating, selecting, concretising and evaluating choices. It finds the decisions linked, so a small choice opens or closes later ones.

Arts-based inquiry: form carries a warrant claim

Arts-based methods make the same argument about authority in a different register. Eisner (1997) argues that the form in which findings are represented shapes what is understood, and can enlarge what an enquiry communicates, while risking evidential warrant. Criteria have to fit the form used.

Bergold and Thomas (2012) approach the quality problem from the participatory side. They argue that participants hold qualitatively different knowledge about the social world under study, and that what counts as a good finding varies with the stakeholders who judge it. The researcher must therefore argue from each stakeholder's own discursive context. On that basis they prefer justificatory arguments to quality criteria. Applied to arts-based work the consequence is uncomfortable: if the audience sets the criteria, the work cannot borrow its warrant from the audience's reaction.

Contested question: is participation a matter of power to be graded, or a paradigm with its own quality arguments?

Two positions are visible and cannot be reconciled by definition. On the first, participation is a distribution of decision-making power, so it can be graded and its absence detected. Arnstein (1969) grades it by who decides, Cornwall and Jewkes (1995) locate the difference between participatory and conventional research in the location of power, and Bratteteig and Wagner (2016) analyse participation as a chain of linked decisions. On this view, warm workshops without decision rights are not participation.

On the second, participation is an epistemology rather than a quantity. Heron and Reason (1997) treat participants as co-researchers within an extended epistemology. Bergold and Thomas (2012) argue that different participants hold different knowledge and values, so quality is answered by justificatory arguments addressed to particular stakeholders rather than by one scale. On this view a ladder is a category error, since it audits a relationship that is constitutive of participatory research rather than contingent.

Halskov and Hansen (2015) give the disagreement an empirical shape: reviewed practice is diverse, so each side can point to projects like its own case. Settling it would need a comparison of comparable projects, each reporting a decision log of who chose what and who held the right to decide. Systematic divergence would show the grading position wrong to treat power as the whole of participation; agreement would force the paradigm position to explain so auditable a footprint. Barab and Squire (2004) show the cost of leaving this open: design-based research has many claims and, on their own account, no agreed warrant.

The two positions differ in what would count as evidence, and the record is thin. The grading position rests on a normative ladder (Arnstein, 1969) and on an analysis of four design projects (Bratteteig and Wagner, 2016); the paradigm position rests on a philosophical argument (Heron and Reason, 1997) and a claim about stakeholder knowledge (Bergold and Thomas, 2012). Only the censuses supply evidence, and they report diversity rather than a verdict. While the dispute is open, a designer should log who decided what, publish that log with the account, and treat a workshop without decision rights as co-production of data. The strongest objection is that a log grades presence at the table while missing the interpretive work the paradigm position says cannot be audited.

Where the argument is heading

The direction of travel is from claiming participation to reporting it. Greenberg (2025) turns co-analysis into a named method with a documentation duty attached, and Bergold and Thomas (2012) move quality from a list of criteria towards arguments addressed to named stakeholders. The unresolved part is the warrant that Barab and Squire (2004) identified and nobody has since closed.

The sources this unit rests on

Each note states what the cited document did and found. Records were checked against registered metadata and Crossref, and every figure against the paper it comes from, on 1 November 2026.

• Sanders, E. B. N. and Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. doi:10.1080/15710880701875068 Describes the shift from designing for users to designing with them, in which the participant becomes the expert of their own experience. Its worked case has nurses designing an ideal patient room with a three-dimensional toolkit.
• Bratteteig, T. and Wagner, I. (2016). Unpacking the notion of participation in participatory design. doi:10.1007/s10606-016-9259-4 Analyses participation as decision-making across four design projects and finds the decisions linked, so a small choice opens or closes later ones. It argues that participation is the sharing of power.
• Halskov, K. and Hansen, N. B. (2015). The diversity of participatory design research practice at PDC 2002 to 2012. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.09.003 Reviews all 102 research papers published at the Participatory Design Conferences from 2002 to 2012 and sorts them into five categories of contribution. It reports significant diversity in how participation is defined and conducted.
• Wacnik, P., Daly, S. R. and Verma, A. (2025). Participatory design: a systematic review and insights for future practice. Design Science, 11, e21. doi:10.1017/dsj.2025.10009 Reviews participatory design research across design journals and conference proceedings and finds the term less rigidly defined as its use has grown, with fourteen techniques and varying degrees of engagement. It names five leverage points, including direct against indirect and early against late participation.
• Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. doi:10.1080/01944366908977225 Sets out a ladder of citizen participation in eight rungs, grouped as non-participation, tokenism and citizen power, each rung measuring how far citizens determine the plan. It is the unit's original statement that participation without power is empty.
• Cornwall, A. and Jewkes, R. (1995). What is participatory research? doi:10.1016/0277-9536(95)00127-s Examines what makes health research participatory and argues that the difference from conventional research lies in where power sits in the process. It asks who defines the problem, who analyses, and who owns and acts on the findings.
• Bodker, S. (1996). Creating conditions for participation. doi:10.1207/s15327051hci1103_2 Analyses the conditions under which users can participate in systems development and argues that conflicts of interest are a resource for design. It supplies the unit's point that participation has material and organisational preconditions.
• Kensing, F. and Blomberg, J. (1998). Participatory design: issues and concerns. doi:10.1023/a:1008689307411 Reviews participatory design as a maturing research area, organised around the politics of design, participation, and methods and tools. It also asks how results transfer to workers and user groups.
• Spinuzzi, C. (2005). The methodology of participatory design. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/28277 Defines participatory design as a methodology with three stages, initial exploration of work, discovery processes and prototyping, whose object of study is the tacit knowledge people develop with technology. Work must be done with users rather than on their behalf.
• Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. doi:10.1177/107780049700300302 Sets out participatory inquiry as a paradigm with an extended epistemology of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing, resting on cooperative relations. It is the unit's strongest statement that the participant is a knower.
• Barab, S. and Squire, K. (2004). Design-based research: putting a stake in the ground. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls1301_1 Lists the unresolved questions design-based research must answer, including what counts as a reasonable warrant for its assertions and how bias in selecting evidence is controlled.
• Wang, C. and Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice. doi:10.1177/109019819702400309 Sets out photovoice, in which people photograph their own community and discuss the images in groups, and states three goals: recording strengths and concerns, promoting dialogue, and reaching policymakers.
• Wang, C. C., Burris, M. A. and Ping, X. Y. (1996). Chinese village women as visual anthropologists: a participatory approach to reaching policymakers. Social Science & Medicine, 42(10), 1391-1400. doi:10.1016/0277-9536(95)00287-1 Reports the Yunnan Women's Health and Development Programme, where village women photographed their own lives and the images reached policymakers, under the name photo novella. It is the primary record of the first photovoice project.
• Eisner, E. W. (1997). The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. doi:10.3102/0013189x026006004 Examines the strengths and weaknesses of alternative literary and artistic forms, arguing that form shapes understanding and can enlarge what an enquiry communicates while risking a loss of evidential warrant.
• Bergold, J. and Thomas, S. (2012). Participatory research methods: a methodological approach in motion. https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1801 Sets out the principles of participatory qualitative research, including safe space, participation and ethics. It argues that because participants hold different knowledge and values, quality is settled by justificatory arguments addressed to named stakeholders.
• Greenberg, D. (2025). Critical participatory co-analysis. doi:10.1177/16094069251342551 Develops critical participatory co-analysis, in which participants interpret data rather than only generate it, working with young people and aiming at multivocal findings. It requires the researcher to document the analytic decisions participants made.