Getting Involved in Research: Evaluating the Positive Self-Management Programme

Working as a university lecturer on a research methods course, the question I am most often asked by potential students is: 'How can I get involved in research when I also have a full-time job?' To which my reply is invariably the same: 'By making your research part of your job.' By this I mean choosing a question or a problem related to a particular aspect of your job that you find interesting and want to resolve. You may suspect that you already know the answer to that question, or the answer may even appear to be common sense. However, until you have subjected a problem to a rigorous and systematic investigation, your 'knowledge' of a solution remains little more than 'guesswork' based on past experience and instinct [1]. A structured approach to solving work-related issues allows us to make research a part of our work and gives the decisions we make a solid evidence-base. Taking such an approach has always been my advice to those who have the will and inclination to become involved in research, but lack the time or the money. It enables you to become involved in research while simultaneously helping you to improve your working practice and create new knowledge that can be shared with your peers. Sharing your research findings will allow others to learn from your experiences and gives you the opportunity to make a difference on a wider scale. One of the easiest ways you can make research a part of your job is through the rigorous evaluation of a new or existing practice, service or policy. Such evaluation is not carried out often enough in the workplace, and when it is, it tends to be informal and too often the results are not written up for publication and dissemination, but kept private. This is a wasted opportunity. Evaluation research is a chance for you to make the most out of something that should already be a mandatory part of your role, and a chance for your employer to assess an important element of their organisation. Obviously each research project has to be developed to meet the needs of a particular question or problem, but a real-world example I frequently use to illustrate how easily work-related evaluation can be turned into research is the work I carried out as part of my involvement in the piloting of the Positive Self-Management Programme (PSMP) in Africa. What follows is a description of the background behind the PSMP pilot; an account of the methodological approach taken in the evaluation; a summary of the research findings; and an outline of how those findings are to be shared and disseminated.