Participatory Q: a collaborative approach to Q-methodology

Participatory research continues to attract attention across academia, civil society, policymaking, and research funding landscapes. Yet Q methodology has not fully explored the full potential of participatory practice, despite its well-recognised democratic characteristics. In this article, we introduce ‘Participatory Q’, a co-productive reimagining of Q methodology, offered not as a prescriptive roadmap for a perfectly participatory approach (if such a thing were even possible), but as a research orientation that challenges researchers to work more collaboratively and reflexively. We propose Participatory Q as both a methodological and epistemological intervention, one that aims to de-centre dominant knowledge systems rooted in the colonial legacy of the Academy, and to foreground pluralistic, community-informed ways of knowing. Drawing on the Queering Shelter project - which explored the meanings of ‘shelter’, ‘safe space’, and ‘home’ among LGBTQ + communities in England, UK - we describe how participatory principles were integrated across all stages of the Q methodology process: from study design and concourse development to analysis and output creation. The aim for this article is to serve as a useful starting point on which others can build, in order to advance Q methodology practice in ways that are not only participatory in technique but also disruptive of epistemic hierarchies.