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Stakeholder engagement primer: 3. Selecting stakeholders

December 21, 2021October 28, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_3

Given that most research projects will not have the funding or time to involve all stakeholders who have been identified as potential contributors, what criteria are useful for selecting those to be invited to participate? How can those identified be assessed against the criteria?

Four criteria for selecting stakeholders are:

their legitimacy
their real and potential power
the urgency they assign to the problem
practical considerations.

Legitimacy

Legitimacy can usefully be examined along the following four dimensions:

Stakeholder engagement primer: 2. Identifying stakeholders

December 21, 2021October 21, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_2

How can all those who have something relevant to contribute to a research project be identified? In particular, how can we find those who, through their experience of being affected by or dealing with a problem, can provide:

a more comprehensive understanding of the problem
ideas about ways to address the problem
insights into how the research can best support policy and practice change on the problem in government, business and civil society?

A wide-ranging and inclusive initial process of identifying stakeholders ensures that key individuals and groups are not missed and that the broadest range of knowledge and perspectives is found, for both understanding and acting on the problem.

Stakeholder engagement primer: 1a. Why a primer? 1b. Defining stakeholders

December 21, 2021October 14, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_1a_1b

1a. Why a primer?

Do researchers who want to engage with stakeholders need a basic set of skills? Can we define a skillset that will work for many problems and in a variety of contexts?

My starting point for this primer is that the answer to both questions is “yes” and I have set out to provide those basics in nine easy-to-read blog posts. The tenth blog post in the series sketches out selected additional “advanced” skills; these need more interpersonal competences, experience, and knowledge.

The advantages of using a blog over other forms of communication are that it provides a vehicle for input and feedback, as well as being widely accessible. Comments on each blog post are therefore very welcome, particularly examples and lessons from your own work, things you wish you had known when you were starting out, and general feedback and critique.

Why we need strengths-based approaches to achieve social justice

January 7, 2022January 12, 2021

By Katie Thurber

author_katie-thurber — Katie Thurber (biography)

Achieving social justice by overcoming social inequality is a burning complex problem. In research which aims to contribute to achieving social justice, what does it mean to move from a deficit discourse to a strengths-based approach? How does such a change impact on the understanding of social inequality, as well as on actions taken to overcome it?

I am part of a group researching Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and we have been grappling with these questions. The issues are also more broadly relevant.

What is a deficit discourse?

A deficit discourse focuses on problems. A common example is the comparison of the group of interest to another social group that has better outcomes. The focus may be on the size of the gap between the groups.

Researcher activism: A voice of experience

August 4, 2020July 7, 2020

By Dorothy Broom

author-dorothy-broom — Dorothy Broom (biography)

In reflecting on my researcher-activist role in women’s health, I’ve come up with six tips that may provide guidance to those embarking on such a role. The lessons I draw can also be relevant in other fields of endeavour, in population health, environmental research and beyond.

Tip 1: Build your legitimacy with those you are aiming to influence and those you are advocating for

My academic research in the 1980s and 90s on the politics of women’s health was distinct from my feminist political activism. Prompted by intellectual curiosity, I developed a research profile that fortuitously prepared me to take on an advocacy role at a time of major policy foment.

My publications and conference presentations gave me legitimacy with public servants charged with policy and program development; while my personal involvement in feminist social action gave me a different kind of credibility with social-movement actors.

Finding expertise in research integration and implementation to tackle complex problems

January 4, 2021May 19, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

Author - Gabriele Bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

When you are pulling together a team to tackle a complex societal or environmental problem, where can you find the expertise to deal with:

Research integration challenges such as: deciding which disciplines and stakeholders to include, setting limits around the problem, dealing with competing problem definitions, managing intractable unknowns, and synthesising different perspectives?
Research implementation challenges such as: identifying likely change agents, taking context into account, developing tools and processes for research to support more effective actions to ameliorate the problem?

Providing a richer assessment of research influence and impact

July 29, 2021April 14, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

How can we affirm, value and capitalise on the unique strengths that each individual brings to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research? In particular, how can we capture diversity across individuals, as well as the richness and distinctness of each individual’s influence and impact?

In the course of writing ten reflective narratives (nine single-authored and one co-authored), eleven of us stumbled on a technique that we think could have broader utility in assessing influence and impact, especially in research but also in education (Bammer et al., 2019).

How can expertise in research integration and implementation help tackle complex problems?

October 11, 2021March 10, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

What is expertise in research integration and implementation? What is its role in helping tackle complex societal and environmental problems, especially those dimensions that define complexity?

Expertise in research integration and implementation

Addressing complex societal and environmental problems requires specific expertise over and above that contributed by existing disciplines, but there is little formal recognition of what that expertise is or reward for contributing it to a research team’s efforts. In brief, such expertise includes the ability to:

identify relevant disciplinary and stakeholder inputs
effectively integrate them for a more comprehensive understanding of the problem
support more effective actions to ameliorate the problem.

Stakeholder engagement in research: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum

November 4, 2021January 7, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

October 2021: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum has been replaced by the i2S Stakeholder Engagement Options Framework.

What options are available to researchers for engaging stakeholders in a research project? What responsibilities do researchers have to stakeholders over the course of that project?

Despite increasing inclusion of stakeholders in research, there seems to be little guidance on how to do this effectively. Here I have adapted a framework developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2 2018) for examining how the public are engaged in government decision making. The research-modified IAP2 spectrum, written from a researcher perspective, is shown in the figure below.

Good practice in community-based participatory processes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research

January 17, 2022December 10, 2019

By Jan Chapman, Alyson Wright, Nadine Hunt and Bobby Maher

authors_jan-chapman_alyson-wright_nadine-hunt_bobby-maher — 1. Jan Chapman (biography)
2. Alyson Wright (biography)
3. Nadine Hunt (biography)
4. Bobby Maher (biography)

How can participatory process in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities be made adaptable and flexible? How can theoretical frameworks take into account the cultural and geographical complexities of communities and their contexts?

Here we provide five key principles that we have found useful in engaging communities in the Mayi Kuwayu Study (https://mkstudy.com.au/). These include: community decision-making; involvement in study governance; community capacity development; effective communications; and, long-term and multi-engagement processes.

The role of persistence in influencing policy with research

May 13, 2022October 29, 2019

By David McDonald

Author - David McDonald — David McDonald (biography)

Seeking to influence policy with our research is difficult. Sometimes we feel that it is too hard, we are not achieving our goals fast enough, and we really should give up and find easier ways of operating. However, persistence, rather than giving up, seems to be a characteristic of those of us working in this domain!

What do we mean by persistence? A good dictionary definition is ‘continuing firmly, especially despite obstacles and protests’. Does that sound familiar: facing obstacles to doing high-quality implementation work, and protests from colleagues who do not share our perceptions of the value of working in this manner?

Using a cartoon video to achieve research impact

March 22, 2022September 17, 2019

By Darren Gray, Yuesheng Li and Don McManus

authors_darren-gray_yuesheng-li_don-mcmanus — 1. Darren Gray (biography)
2. Yuesheng Li (biography)
3. Don McManus (biography)

In the right circumstances, a cartoon video can be an effective way to communicate research information. But what’s involved in developing a cartoon video?

This blog post is based on our experience as a Chinese-Australian partnership in developing an educational cartoon video (The Magic Glasses, link at end of post) which aimed to prevent soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worm) infections in Chinese schoolchildren. We believe that the principles we applied are more broadly applicable and share them here.