Partner – PopulationHealthXchange

Stakeholder engagement primer: 9. Evaluating engagement

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_9

How can the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement be judged? How can the outcomes be assessed? How much effort should go into such evaluation?

How and when to evaluate

In any stakeholder engagement there is no shortage of aspects that could be evaluated. The challenge is aligning the audience for the evaluation, the key issues to be assessed and the available resources.

For example, if a research team is interested in learning from what went wrong in a stakeholder engagement (for instance, if a stakeholder stopped participating or became hostile) and has no money set aside for evaluation, it might rely on self-reflection and anecdotal evidence to figure out what happened.

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 8. Generating ideas and reaching agreement

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_8

What skills for generating ideas and reaching agreement should every researcher involved in stakeholder engagement seek to cultivate? What key methods and concepts should they be familiar with?

The focus in this blog post is on generating ideas and reaching agreement, as well as recognising the “groan zone” between these two phases in a group process. Researchers will have diverse attributes and not everyone will be well-placed to cultivate the skills described here. Having an understanding of the skills can help in choosing the researchers best placed to undertake the stakeholder engagement.

Generating ideas: Brainstorming

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 7. Listening and dialogue

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_7

What skills should every researcher involved in stakeholder engagement seek to cultivate? What key tools for engaging stakeholders should they be familiar with?

In the next two blog posts, I present key skills and tools that are essential for engaging with stakeholders. Understanding these skills can help teams decide who would be best among their members to be responsible for stakeholder engagement. Those involved in stakeholder engagement can also work to strengthen these skills to underpin other useful methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and participatory modelling.

This blog post presents skills involved in listening and dialogue. The next presents tools for generating ideas and reaching agreement.

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 6. Making engagement effective

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_6

How can researchers ensure that stakeholder contributions ― whether through consultation, involvement or collaboration ― are properly valued? What steps can researchers take to make stakeholder participation as effective as possible? How can damaging pitfalls be avoided?

Researchers can make the stakeholder engagement process maximally effective by paying attention to the following three aspects:

  1. ensuring credibility, relevance and legitimacy of stakeholder contributions
  2. accommodating stakeholder motivations, expertise and ability to participate
  3. avoiding or managing potential pitfalls.

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 5. Choosing engagement options

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_5

How can researchers decide which engagement options will be most appropriate for which stakeholders? How can they take into account multiple considerations such as the aims of stakeholder engagement, the requirements of the research and available resources?

It can be helpful to think through how each option for stakeholder engagement (described in Primer #4) would be operationalised for each stakeholder, using the questions below. These make explicit what researchers often do intuitively.

By teasing out specifically what is required and matching this with the available resources – time, money and person-power – the aim is to reduce the possibility of a project running out of steam for stakeholder engagement before it is concluded and to maximise the chances that the commitments made by researchers to stakeholders (the ‘promise’ described in Primer #4) for each type of engagement can be fulfilled.

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 4. Options for engagement

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_4

What options are available to researchers for including stakeholders in a research project in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the problem, provide ideas about addressing it and help the research to support policy or practice change? Can different stakeholders be included in different ways? Can the same group of stakeholders participate in different ways in various aspects of the research? What obligations do researchers have to participating stakeholders over the course of that project?

It can be useful to consider 5 ways in which researchers can include stakeholders in a project:

1. Inform:
Researchers provide stakeholders with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the research.

2. Consult:
Researchers obtain stakeholder feedback on the research.

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 3. Selecting stakeholders

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:

Read more

Stakeholder engagement primer: 2. Identifying stakeholders

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.

Read more

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

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.

Read more

Why we need strengths-based approaches to achieve social justice

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.

A consequence of deficit discourse is constant negative portrayal of the group of interest.

Read more

Researcher activism: A voice of experience

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.

Read more

Finding expertise in research integration and implementation to tackle complex problems

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?

Currently there is no one place to find all this expertise, but there are two major groups who can contribute parts of it:

Read more