Creative strategies work effectively to make public participants feel more comfortable about taking part and sharing their ideas. Changing the researcher-participant hierarchies can mean that some researchers need more clarity on their role in this new situation to make sure that projects can go forwards. Managing expectations and building in time and resources for facilitating ongoing engagement will help workshops turn into projects.

Create to Collaborate (2020-2022) was a collaborative research project with the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research and the National Institute for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration West at the University of Bristol that explored how creative activities and facilitation can improve inclusivity in public involvement in health research. As Co-Investigator I led on the creative workshop design, collaboration with creative partners and contributed to data analysis. The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust (£97k) and we worked with Coney, ZU-UK and Ellie Shipman as creative partners.

The project explored the process of collaborative research, looking at whether we could build stronger collaborative relationships with members of the public who are under-represented in health research by focusing on building interpersonal relationships between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ researchers or research participants (with the overall aim to support the levelling of power hierarchies). We were also interested in exploring whether the use of creative activities can help people get involved in research who would not normally do so

As part of the project we ran 5 online workshops, each a collaboration with an artist on a different theme within health research, to bring together participants and researchers who were interested in similar topics. We evaluated the workshops through interviews to understand the experiences of all participants.  

Insights from the project

The workshops started with introductory games and activities rather than the usual introductions of what people’s roles were. Activities included games, playful tasks that challenged hierarchies and power dynamics, as well as role reversals, poetry, and an illustrated booklet on the topic for people to work through. Most public participants enjoyed this approach and felt more able to share things, describing the workshops as engaging, enjoyable, interesting, great fun, exciting, uplifting, enlightening, non-judgemental, equitable, welcoming and friendly.  

Some researchers found this approach to research involvement workshops more difficult, as they were not as clear on their role within the session (compared to more traditional workshops they’d been involved in). We learnt that trying to change researcher-participant hierarchies in this way might be positive for public participants but also meant that some people were not sure what role they should take or who would be able to take an idea forward. This meant that longer-term collaborations needed to be supported for instance by existing programmes of work or a well-established public involvement group.

We shared some recommendations to better support collaborative research in an article we published about the workshops. These include:

• Supporting co-production through increasing researcher access to training, resources, networks and funds

• Ensuring there is enough time and space set aside during a project to support collaboration, build relationships and trust, and remove barriers between researchers and members of the public

• Managing expectations of all collaborative partners is important. Collaborative projects need to work for everyone

• Building in the time, resources and senior leader support needed to follow up on ideas and support further collaborations. With this support community-led ideas can become community-based research

Read the article based on the project here: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40900-023-00512-8

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