Partner – PopulationHealthXchange – Page 3 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Providing a richer assessment of research influence and impact

August 11, 2023April 14, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

author - gabriele bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

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).We wrote the reflective narratives for a special issue on Julie Thompson Klein’s academic work, in our case especially her impact in Australia and New Zealand. (A taste of Klein’s work can be found in her contributions to this i2Insights blog.)

The process of writing the reflective narratives was unstructured, with each of us writing as much or as little as we wished on whatever aspect of Klein’s work had resonated with us.

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October 2021: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum has been replaced by the i2S Stakeholder Engagement Options Framework.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

August 2, 2023December 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.

Community decision-making

A key principle is to seek community endorsement and decision-making from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander governance groups on their community’s participation in the study.

The role of persistence in influencing policy with research

August 11, 2023October 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?

Learning about persistence from decades of experience at the ODI

The London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has worked for decades in developing concepts, processes and tools to help researchers and others work more effectively at the research/policy interfaces, particularly regarding international development and humanitarian issues.

Using a cartoon video to achieve research impact

August 2, 2023September 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.

Developing the cartoon video involved three major steps: formative research, production, and pilot testing plus revision.

Formative research

The aim of the formative research is to better understand what you want to change, which in our case was a reduction in behaviours which put Chinese children at risk of being infected by soil-transmitted helminths.

Five lessons for early career researchers in interacting with policymakers

February 17, 2022July 23, 2019

By Aparna Lal

How, as an early career researcher, can you get started in developing a working relationship with government policy makers? What do you need to be prepared for? What benefits can you expect?

Here I present five lessons from my first self-initiated engagement with policymakers. I am a computer modeller exploring the links between water-quality, climate and health. As such, my research sits at the crossroads of environmental science and public health. At the end of 2018, I decided to present some of my work to the Australian Capital Territory Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate.

My anticipated outcomes from this presentation were to start a conversation around water and health in the Australian Capital Territory and to leave the meeting with new insights. I also learnt the following lessons:

Managing uncertainty in decision making: What can we learn from economics?

August 11, 2023June 4, 2019

By Siobhan Bourke and Emily Lancsar

authors_siobhan-bourke_emily-lancsar — 1. Siobhan Bourke (biography)
2. Emily Lancsar (biography)

How can researchers interested in complex societal and environmental problems best understand and deal with uncertainty, which is an inherent part of the world in which we live? Accidents happen, governments change, technological innovation occurs making some products and services obsolete, markets boom and inevitably go bust. How can uncertainty be managed when all possible outcomes of an action or decision cannot be known? In particular, are there lessons from the discipline of economics which have broader applicability?

While uncertainty is often discussed alongside risk, a fundamental difference between uncertainty and risk is that risk involves events with known probabilities (or probabilities based on reliable empirical evidence), whereas under uncertainty probabilities are unknown and reflect an individual’s subjective belief concerning the likelihood of a given outcome. Given the subjectivity, that likelihood can differ from person to person. It can also involve a perceived zero probability in the case of unforeseen events (or ‘unknown unknowns’).

What every interdisciplinarian should know about p values

April 15, 2022April 30, 2019

By Alice Richardson

In interdisciplinary research it’s common for at least some data to be analysed using statistical techniques. Have you been taught to look for ‘p < 0.05’ meaning that there is a less than 5% probability that the finding occurred by chance? Do you look askance at your statistician colleagues when they tell you it’s not so simple? Here’s why you need to believe them.

The whole focus on p < 0.05 to the exclusion of all else is a historical hiccup, based on a throwaway line in a manual for research workers. That manual was produced by none other than R.A. Fisher, giant of statistical inference and inventor of statistical methods ranging from the randomised block design to the analysis of variance. But all he said was that “[p = 0.05] is convenient to take … as a limit in judging whether a deviation is to be considered significant or not.” Convenient, nothing more!

Tracking stakeholder engagement and research impact

August 24, 2025February 12, 2019

By Cathy Day

Is there an easy and efficient way to keep track of stakeholder engagement and research impact?

My colleagues and I have developed a system with two components: (1) noting engagement and impact soon after they occur and (2) recording them in a way that enables the information to be extracted for whatever purpose is required. I describe the tracking spreadsheet, the recording process we use and then how the spreadsheet is used for reporting.

Tracking spreadsheet

The Microsoft Excel tracking spreadsheet has two parts: (1) the engagement or impact and (2) the research to which these are related. These are arranged in columns, which can be adapted for the needs of any particular group.

Scatterplots as an interdisciplinary communication tool

September 11, 2024December 4, 2018

By Erin Walsh

Scatterplots are used in many disciplines, which makes them useful for communicating across disciplines. They are also common in newspapers, online media and elsewhere as a tool to communicate research results to stakeholders, ranging from policy makers to the general public. What makes a good scatterplot? Why do scatterplots work? What do you need to watch out for in using scatterplots to communicate across disciplines and to stakeholders?

What makes a good scatterplot?

A flexible framework for stakeholder engagement

September 11, 2024October 23, 2018

By Michelle Banfield

How can stakeholder engagement in research be effectively planned? What parameters need to be taken into account? How can flexibility be built in to accommodate different levels of researcher and stakeholder experience?

The framework presented here was developed for health services research, but is more broadly applicable. The framework has three separate dimensions.

The stakeholders to involve
The stages of the research at which they will be involved
The level of involvement for each stakeholder group at each stage.