Experiences of Inclusive Action and Social Design Research with Social Workers and People with Intellectual Disabilities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The introduction of this paper made be curious, the follow-up was slightly confusing and at times disappointing, however. I will make explicit why:

- the paper is about processes of working together (a two years’ experience of inclusive action and design research consisting of intensive collaboration between social workers, people with intellectual disabilities and researchers), as well as outcomes of two CoDs. The processes of collaboration unfortunately are not very well elaborated on. The social workers and people with intellectual disabilities do not have a voice nor face in this paper. The results mainly consist of activities and outcomes, whereas in the discussion power imbalance and collective ownership are shortly reflected upon, but not shown in the paper, e.g.: “The participants lacked digital skills”: what did the researchers do to make sure the participants remained participants and co-owners of the project?

- The state of the art of inclusive research, action and design research are well elaborated on in the introduction. The theoretical lens of method configuration is not. How did this work as a theoretical lens? The Double Diamond model is not explained. Further, the goal of the research is not clear at the end of the introduction: Below we share the experiences of carrying out inclusive action and social design research with people with intellectual disability and social workers. Later on the goal is formulates as “…principally  aimed at answering the research question on behaviour of social workers that fits inclusion focused performance.” And as “The aim of our research was to bring about changes that contribute to a more inclusive social work practice.”  To me this paper suffers from to many concepts and accents that are not sufficiently coordinated.

- the two CoDs could be distinguished more clearly, e.g. with subheadings

- the final conclusion of the research: merging action research and social design research can bring more balance in following the different paths of inclusive research, to me is not well demonstrated in the paper.

 

 

Author Response

See attached our response to Review Report (Reviewer 1).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I want to thank the authors for this interesting manuscript on. I have listed some remarks to increase clarity of the manuscript:

 

1. The authors use the term ‘participative research’, I do wonder if they refer with this to ‘participatory research design’ which is a more common and widely used phrasing?
2. In 1.1.1 the authors outline an interesting overview of inclusive, action and design research. However, it remains unclear why these research methodologies are discussed, how they relate to one another and maybe other methodologies are left out? As the authors state: ‘we would like to add..’, what is the rationale for discussing these methodologies in this overview?
3. The numbering of the paragraphs in the introduction does not seem logic to me. I think the authors need to review this.
4. The authors end the introduction by stating which foci are valuable. I think this refers to what is stated before (with the reference of Milner & Frawley, 2019). It is not clear to me why these two paragraphs are mentioned at the end of this part, I think the introduction needs to be restructured to create more clarity in the message the authors want to provide.
5. The authors state they describe a research ‘with’ people with ID and social workers and not ‘on’ or ‘by’, although, they previously stated a mixture of the three waves is important.
6. Overall in the introduction the authors focus on ‘how’ inclusive research can be conducted. Although, by reading this I’m also interested in ‘why’, what is the added value according to the various actors.
7. The execution and data gathering is not very clear to me. For example: the data collected in phase 2 was verified with the participants. How was this done and for which purpose? What was verified, the results of these meetings or the data gathered in this meeting?
8. Please provide more information in phase 3 on how data was coded and what and how descriptive analyses were done. How it is described at this moment I don’t have a good idea of what has been done in this phase.

Author Response

Please find attached our response to Review Report (Reviewer 2).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper has clearly improved, thank you.