The argument rests on a significant tension at the heart of modern doctoral education. Public and patient involvement in research, often abbreviated to PPI, is now embedded in health and care legislation, professional education and the requirements of major research funders in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. In the UK, bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research treat public involvement as a fundamental component of good research practice, while in the United States the Patient-Centred Outcomes Research Institute actively encourages engagement in funded studies. Yet, despite this policy shift, the structures of the PhD, conceived as an individual pursuit culminating in a solo-authored thesis and an oral defence, have largely failed to adapt, leaving doctoral candidates who want to work collaboratively facing regulatory, financial and cultural obstacles.

The network itself emerged from a single social media post in April 2023, in which one author asked when the rules of PhDs would change to recognise collective endeavour in knowledge production. The question struck a chord. More than fifty people from the UK and beyond joined the first online meeting in July 2023, and the group has since grown into a structured network with subgroups dedicated to issues ranging from ethics and funding to examination practice. Its members span the full spectrum of doctoral life, from aspiring students to supervisors, examiners and people who contribute their lived experience to doctoral research, and the new paper draws on the personal reflections of eight members who have carried out participatory PhDs themselves.

Technically, the authors draw careful distinctions between related but distinct traditions. Participatory research, rooted in critical and emancipatory scholarship, aims to redistribute power across the research process, with people from marginalised groups acting as co-researchers and decision-makers at every stage. Patient and public involvement, by contrast, refers to structured involvement of lay contributors, most commonly in health and social care, and does not necessarily entail shared epistemic authority or co-production of knowledge. Co-production overlaps with both but is applied more broadly across research, service design and evaluation. The authors stress that these approaches operate along a spectrum rather than fitting into binary categories, shaped by the capacities, interests and institutional circumstances of everyone involved, and they argue against a one-size-fits-all definition of what participation should look like.

The practical barriers the network identifies are considerable. Doctoral regulations in the UK and many other countries require students to demonstrate an independent and original contribution to knowledge, a criterion that sits awkwardly with genuinely collaborative inquiry. At one Scottish university, the authors found no specific guidelines for working with members of the public on research, beyond rules for commercial or professional collaboration that require formal letters of engagement and named partners on the thesis. Ethical approval processes present further difficulties, since they often assume an extractive, researcher-led model and can blur the distinction between a research participant, a co-researcher and a member of a reference group, even though UK Health Research Authority guidance states that ethics approval is not required when involving people in the planning or design stage of research.

Examination practices compound the problem. The viva voce, the oral examination in which candidates defend their thesis, focuses on the final written product rather than the process, which is problematic for participatory projects whose collaborative dimension may not be visible in a solo-authored document. It remains unclear whether co-researchers can co-author parts of a thesis or attend the viva, and one network member reported being told that including a public contributor at their examination might be impossible because of academic regulations and questions about the contributor’s qualifications. The authors describe the language of defending a thesis as itself reflecting the exclusive nature of the traditional PhD, and they note that adapting collaborative chapters into a single-voiced academic format can erase the very contributions that made the research meaningful, even when the collaborative writing process is, as one recent candidate described it, a radical act of epistemic justice.

Funding and training gaps are equally pressing. Doctoral students frequently operate on limited budgets, and the additional costs of participatory work, such as reimbursing contributors for their time, can be unattainable without dedicated support. At one English university, a facilitating research fund has been used successfully to pay co-researchers, but only by classifying them as consultants within a PPI framework rather than as researchers in a participatory project, illustrating how payment systems themselves can reinforce hierarchies. Training resources for public involvement tend to target early career researchers and beyond, with few specific programmes for doctoral students, although examples of good practice exist, including a co-designed Master’s unit in Public Involvement in Research at Bournemouth University and participatory action research training for education doctoral students reported in the United States.

The paper situates these demands within a changing policy landscape. The UK’s Research and Evaluation Framework, which assesses university research quality and informs public funding, is shifting toward openness and collaboration: the upcoming REF2029 renames research environment as People, Culture and Environment and raises its weighting from fifteen to twenty-five per cent, while impact becomes Engagement and Impact, broadening the evidence base accepted for case studies. Legislative frameworks add further momentum, with the Care Act 2014 in England and the Social Services and Well-being Act 2014 in Wales both positioning co-production as a central principle of public services. To help visualise what is possible, the network co-created a logic model mapping participatory activities onto every stage of the doctoral journey, from question formulation and literature reviewing to data analysis, dissemination and co-authorship, while also flagging principles to consider and current limitations that remain impossible to overcome.

Underlying the practical proposals is a deeper epistemological argument. The authors contend that participatory methods require a shift in ontological and epistemological paradigms, connecting their case to decolonial critiques that seek to share power, recognise knowledge systems erased by European colonialism and rehumanise research. They confront the standard criticism that participatory approaches compromise scientific rigour, countering that societies are not homogenous and that positivist methods focused on large trends often miss crucial nuance. Citing work on the three Rs of rigour, relevance and reach, they point to evidence that community-based participatory research can strengthen all three, producing findings that matter to local people, attract wider attention and benefit from community scrutiny. They also note that traditional academia is not free of bias, citing cases of retraction and misconduct, and arguing that explicit positionality and reflexivity can increase transparency rather than diminish it.

The authors are candid about the limits of their own perspective, acknowledging that the voices of people drawing on care and support services, unpaid carers, people with learning disabilities, abuse survivors, working-class and homeless people remain under-represented both in their network and in research more broadly. Their recommendations are correspondingly ambitious: universities and funders should create environments conducive to participatory work, reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, ring-fence funding, adapt milestones and policies, and embed participatory principles in research methods education from undergraduate level onward. The paper sets out principles for a participatory PhD, including supported students, experienced supervisors, agreed power-sharing with public contributors, flexible funding and adaptability to changing circumstances. The Participatory PhD Network intends to continue developing this emerging field, and its members argue that only by recognising diverse forms of knowledge, including experiential expertise grounded in equalised relations of power, can doctoral education remain relevant, rigorous and aligned with a more democratic vision of knowledge production.

Subject of Research: Reforming doctoral education to support participatory and collaborative PhD research with public and lived-experience involvement

Article Title: Supporting participatory PhDs: a call to action

Article References: Supporting participatory PhDs: a call to action. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01776-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01776-1

Keywords: participatory PhD, doctoral education, patient and public involvement, co-production, research methods, Higher Education, viva examination, research funding, epistemic justice, decolonial research, Participatory PhD Network, research ethics