Paying attention to tension: studying the perspectives of health care workers, sports club volunteers, and people with type 2 diabetes, engaged in public-civil physical activity collaboration

Collaborations between public institutions and civil society organisations are popular. One such context for public-civil collaboration is rehabilitation, where health care institutions and sports clubs collaborate in supporting physical activity for people with non-communicable diseases. More specifically, our study involves health care workers, sports club volunteers, and people with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), whose perspectives on physical activity might differ. The objective of this article is methodological in the sense that we aim to explore how focusing on moments of tension, arising in interactions between the different people involved, may be useful for researching perspectives on public-civil collaborations. To accomplish this goal, we describe how we conducted fieldwork during collaborative rehabilitation practices and how moments of tension manifested in the fieldnotes. Upon realising the potential significance of such moments, we identified six areas in which tension arose. Two of these areas are then used as examples to show how we moved analytically from the moments of tension identified in the fieldnotes to formulating interest/value statements (IVSs). Subsequently, we describe how these IVSs were utilised in focus group interviews to stimulate conversations by (re)creating tension. Furthermore, leaning on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, we discuss how IVSs based on moments of tension might lead to discussions around not only the views of the other parties in collaborations but also the reasons for those views, and the legitimacy of those reasons.