Community-led, participatory research and citizen science can build bridges beyond academia, foster trust, broaden and enrich insights and, ultimately, make the knowledge produced more meaningful. It involves working with non-academic partners who may be enthusiast amateurs, patients or communities with a stake in the research. The process of recruiting and working with non-scholars in research at any stage, from co-production to gathering data and sharing findings, brings complexities.
Done well, public engagement in research demands well-managed logistics, transparency, careful balancing of competing interests, data management, safeguarding and ethical practices. This collection highlights essential skills of collaboration, cultural awareness and sensitivity, critical thinking, and the capacity to think across and beyond disciplines.
Create a research culture that welcomes the public in
Public engagement is increasingly integral to the work of universities in connecting with communities and demonstrating the real-world impact of teaching and research. And while many academics recognise the benefits of broad public engagement in their work, it may feel unachievable if the culture and structures in which they are working do not encourage it. Find out how to create an institution-wide ethos of outreach, openness and inclusion and gather advice on building public engagement, with purpose, into your research right from the start.
Steps to take to encourage more support for public engagement in research: By fostering a culture in which public engagement is not just encouraged but embedded into the fabric of academic life, institutions can leave a lasting impact on both the scholarly community and the world at large, writes Lyn R. Keith of the University of the West Indies.
How to embed public engagement into your teaching and research activities: Carenza Lewis of the University of Lincoln shares a step-by-step guide for embedding public engagement into your institution’s research and teaching
Enhance your research through public engagement and collaboration: How can academics shape research around mutually beneficial public engagement and collaboration? Emily Burns of Queen Mary University of London.
How to build a citizen science research culture: Practical advice from a team at the University of Chester for building inclusive and innovative research cultures that prepare students for real-world challenges.
Recruiting, engaging and retaining non-expert volunteers
While involving diverse individuals and communities in your research may bring many benefits, care must be taken over how you recruit research participants and retain their interest. Professional academic norms may need to be set aside for more open, human approaches that build trust. Here, researchers share lessons from their experiences of engaging the public in their studies.
Citizen science in biomedical engineering: rewards and challenges: Citizen science can enrich research findings and lead to innovative solutions to real-world problems, writes Robin Queen of Virginia Tech. She explains how researchers can address the potential challenges of working with non-expert volunteers from the start.
‘Doing human’: ways for researchers to make patients feel comfortable to express themselves: When patient and public involvement is done in an inclusive, safe environment, it results in more relevant, higher-quality health and social care research, writes Gary Hickey of the University of Southampton.
When engaging young people in participatory research, trust is key: How can we collaborate with young people to co-produce research? Abigail Harrison Moore and Lauren Theweneti of the University of Leeds and Sheffield Hallam University share three things to keep in mind.
Influence social change with your research by building relationships: Researchers from Edinburgh Napier University needed to form relationships with a range of people when evaluating Police Scotland’s use of the drug naloxone. Peter Hillen and Inga Heyman explain how they did it.
Use arts-based methods to widen participation in research
The arts can be a powerful vehicle for participatory research and public engagement. Creative forms such as film and performance offer a framework for collaboration and a medium for sharing and humanising research. These resources offer insight into the skills required to effectively involve participants in such work.
The Verbatim Formula - using creative arts for collaborative research: Find out how performance practices can support participatory research centred around emotionally charged lived experiences, based on the work of Sylvan Baker and Maggie Inchley of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Queen Mary University of London, respectively.
Using documentary film to communicate your social research: Film can humanise your research and make it accessible to an audience beyond your field. Here are five key takeaways from Rosalind Edwards of the University of Southampton’s experience of bringing sociology to life.
The power of participatory podcasts as a research method: Instead of seeing podcasting as an alternative output, producing a series with a group of youth curators helped Abigail Harrison Moore and Lauren Theweneti, of the University of Leeds and Sheffield Hallam University, understand how significant it can be for participatory research.
Advice for running a citizen science project
Citizen science – the practice of working with the public to collect and analyse research data – is a fantastic way of scaling research while boosting public interest and engagement in your work. Most often associated with quantitative science research relating to astrophysics or wildlife surveys, academics are now exploring more nuanced forms of participatory research such as ‘citizen social science’ as described below.
How to harness community knowledge to tackle complex policy challenges: Working with local communities can help uncover new insights to tackle complex social policy challenges. Saffron Woodcraft and Joseph Cook of UCL explain how to set up high-impact citizen social science research.
Unlock knowledge within local communities through citizen social science: With regional prosperity now central to the UK government’s thinking, universities need to transform the way they conduct research to respond to emerging needs and provide solutions to today’s social, economic and environmental issues. Henrietta L. Moore, founder and director of the Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL, makes the case for citizen social science and explains how it can work.
Campus talks: unlocking people power through citizen science: Find out how engaging non-academics in research can uncover and disperse new knowledge and ways of thinking that help shape solutions to seemingly intractable problems. You will hear from Henrietta L. Moore, founder and director of UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), citizen scientist Joel Bitok and Alan Irwin of Copenhagen Business School.
Ways for universities to connect with the public
From large scale festivals and small Q&A events to working with influential partner organisations, there are multiple ways that university teams can reach out to engage with people beyond campus – or invite the public in. The breaking down of boundaries between universities and surrounding communities, described below, is where public engagement starts.
It’s crucial for universities to bridge the ‘town and gown’ divide: James Derounian of the University of Bolton considers how universities act as good neighbours to their host communities and recommends a simple exercise to break free of the ivory towers.
A clear vision for university-community partnerships: Mutual respect, actively listening to each other’s perspectives and clear mechanisms to evidence impact should be the foundation of a university-community collaboration. Here’s how a partnership between Aston University and Aston Villa Football Club has helped thousands of children in Birmingham.
Lessons from first-time festival planners: Co-creating a large-scale, impactful public event can seem more like a ‘would love to’ than a ‘must’, particularly in the face of resource pressures or lack of an established culture or calendar. Here’s advice learned from developing a four-day festival from scratch, from a University of Chester team.
Bridging the gap between academia and local communities: Institutions that integrate public engagement into their core mission will contribute to stronger, more connected communities. Here are lessons from running an on-campus science bazaar at Oxford Brookes University by Ellie-May Beaman.
Campus talks - how to do public engagement: What is best practice for universities’ public engagement? How do you enlist the public in your research? And how do you keep them interested in the long term? Two 2022 THE Awards winners – Tanya Wood of King’s College London and Hugo Bowles of the University of Buckingham – share their insights, from experiences tracking Covid and decoding Dickens.
Multi-agency research on contentious issues
In areas such as healthcare, researchers work closely with professional bodies, patients, advocacy groups and the public. This is important to produce well-adapted services but is not always easy. These resources offer insight into managing projects through uncertainty and disagreement.
‘Uncertainty is part of co-production’ in research: Flexibility and an open mindset can help health researchers work with healthcare professionals and patients to create better adapted services. Here, Gary Hickey of the University of Southampton shares ways to navigate through the process.
Embracing disagreement in research co-production: Co-producing a research project is not all consensus and harmony, so these four tips, also from Gary Hickey, will guide research collaborators in how to allow and enable disagreements and dissenting voices.
Community engagement across divides
By working with remote or marginalised communities, researchers can bring unheard voices and perspectives for the fore. But they must ensure participants feel respected, listened to and empowered by the process and research does not tip towards being tick box or extractive. Read case studies and advice on how to build equal research partnerships across geographic, cultural and socio-economic divides.
Lessons for co-producing research with affected communities: Advice on meaningfully engaging with diverse communities to co-produce research, drawn from a project looking at treatment for neglected tropical diseases in Liberia, by Rosalind McCollum of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
Community-engaged research can give a voice to marginalised people: Our biggest challenges cannot be resolved by ‘expert’ research alone – community knowledge is essential. Tara Mahoney and Scott Neufeld of Simon Fraser University argue that researchers should let communities set the agenda.
In this together: developing meaningful community engagement: Anna Walas of the University of Nottingham offers advice for facilitating community engagement with research by considering ways in which effective engagement design can help overcome common barriers.
Why learning to listen will help you avoid ‘helicopter research’ and make you a better science communicator: A year of failed fieldwork in Africa led Sallie Burrough of the University of Oxford to ask questions about how researchers interact with the societies they work in. She shares five tips for transparent, inclusive practices.
Thank you to all who contributed their expertise and insight to this guide.
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