What is science research all about?

What are the obstacles to a form of social science that co-produces research with its research 'subjects'?

• A more collaborative social science might be impeded by concerns about intellectual property, funding, timescales, and concerns about partiality. And yet it seems that this kind of research would have distinct benefits: it taps sources of knowledge in a way that less collaborative approaches leave untapped; it offers greater accountability to the public(s) who are eventually supposed to benefit from the research; and it may have the effect of increasing democratic deliberation about issues people have in common.

• Answer:

  There has been a long debate around this in the field of Action Research and other participatory approaches which aim at empowering the people you work with to move from research objects to partners. One great concern of a lot of traditional researchers is that by using empowering methods you change the thing you are researching through the research process, thus it is more difficult to tell what part of the things you find out are "truths about the world" and which part are actually effects of your research. Also, if your research partners learn and evolve as an effect of your research, the data would stop being replicable. If you say: "I don't care, it just doesn't make sense for me to do research about people instead of with them, and then write papers about them that they would never even understand." you do that at a personal career risk, because you limit the kinds of journals you can publish in and will have to deal with the critizism of those reviewers and colleagues who believe that you and your research object should be two strictly separate things and that the goal of research is to increase the knowledge base, not to change the world. How great that risk is, differs from discipline to discipline, you are absolutely fine doing this in anthropology, but might be looked at funny in economics... My personal perception is that this is slowly changing in most discipline, towards being more open to research that empowers participants. But I might be biased because maybe I just have developed my own little micro-environment of people who share my priorities...