[Popular participatory rehabilitation research: insights into a project on social work in occupational...

Participatory research is increasingly being promoted in rehabilitation sciences. It is now recommended that this type of research be consistently considered in funding applications for rehabilitation research. However, the structural paradoxes and other challenges associated with participatory research are still neglected. There is also a lack of systematic evaluations of whether and to what extent participatory research fulfills the epistemological and democratic expectations associated with it. Against this background, the implementation of a participatory research style in a research project will be presented and how participatory research can contribute to more meaningful findings and empowerment will be critically reflected upon and contextualized.In the ANSAB research project, a participatory research style in the sense of advisory participation was implemented and vocational rehabilitants were involved in the project advisory board. They were also included in the design of the interview guidelines and the interpretation of the results. In addition, narrative interviews were conducted with seven of the participating rehabilitants and analyzed using content analysis. The insights gained in this way and the empirical material made it possible to achieve results on the implementation of participatory rehabilitation research.The results showed that the participating vocational rehabilitants felt empowered by their work on the advisory board and would also like to empower other people in a similar situation. Furthermore, they were actively involved in the research process and thus contributed to the application-oriented acquisition of knowledge.On the one hand, the results are encouraging with regard to the expectations associated with participatory research, but on the other hand, they also point to the challenges and limitations of this style of research. Based on our findings and the results of other research projects that pursue a participatory research style, recommendations for implementation should be revised again, considering the different areas of application in the rehabilitation sciences.