Introduction
The UKRI funded SEE-Impact project led by Annette Boaz has explored how the engagement of potential stakeholders (such as policy makers) in the processes of a research study might increase the impact of research.
The study has used a range of methods including interviews, surveys, observations and reviews of documents to develop a detailed understanding of how stakeholder engagement might work as a mechanism for promoting impact.
Outputs and findings
In a series of open access papers, it has explored:
- The methodological challenges of doing prospective research of this nature, in a paper titled Expect the unexpected? Challenges of prospectively exploring stakeholder engagement in research.
- The principles that might underpin this work, in How to engage stakeholders in research: design principles to support improvement
- Drawing on STS, how to tell the story of stakeholder engagement, Envisioning and shaping translation of knowledge into action: A comparative case-study of stakeholder engagement in the development of a European tobacco control tool
- And an article exploring some of the tensions between engagement and co-production and academic identity, How far does an emphasis on stakeholder engagement and co-production in research present a threat to academic identity and autonomy? A prospective study across five European countries.
The study was conducted in the UK and four other European countries (Germany, Hungary, Spain, The Netherlands), allowing the team to compare stakeholder involvement in different contexts.
It is hoped that the findings will be of use to a wide range of medical research funders, in the public and charitable sectors, who are increasingly concerned to engage different groups of stakeholders and users in their research, so that research better meets their needs.
In a recent blog reflecting on the project, Annette Boaz suggested that efforts to facilitate co-production should focus on the practice as an epistemological, rather than methodological challenge, and focus on enabling the creation of academic identities that allow for authentic collaboration with research stakeholders. Read more on LSE Impact: Lost in co-production: To enable true collaboration we need to nurture different academic identities.
You can find all project publications in our resources section.