Participation and coping. A mutual dependence?

Abstract

What implications might an understanding of a mutual dependence between the concepts of participation and coping have for professional engagement with service users? This article presents why participation is central to peoples’ lives and how service user coping with and personal participating in everyday life might be understood. Service users have access to personal and environmental resources and want to manage their everyday life as much as possible. To be able to cope they have to participate. An analytical framework was developed as a result of a study based on qualitative interviews with service users in Norway. A framework was constructed to explore how the service users participated and coped with their everyday life – both on an individual level and through interactions with their environment. This framework emerged from preliminary analysis and was then used in further analysis of the data. The study showed that professionals would be advised to build on the participation and coping that service users had established in their daily life as citizens as well as people using social services. Some service users expressed that the more social contexts they participated in, the better they experienced their coping.