Storytelling – Integration and Implementation Insights

Providing a richer assessment of research influence and impact

July 29, 2021April 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).

A framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice

September 13, 2021March 3, 2020

By Laura Meagher and David Edwards

author-laura-meagher — Laura Meagher (biography)

What is meant by impact generation and how can it be facilitated, captured and shared? How can researchers be empowered to think beyond ‘instrumental’ impact and identify other changes generated by their work? How can the cloud of complexity be dispersed so that numerous factors affecting development of impacts can be seen? How can a way be opened for researchers to step back and reflect critically on what happened and what could be improved in the future? How can research teams and stakeholders translate isolated examples of impact and causes of impact into narratives for both learning and dissemination?

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.

Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions

April 15, 2022July 2, 2019

By Bonnie McBain

What makes scenarios useful to decision makers in effectively planning for the future? Here I discuss three aspects of scenarios:

goals;
design; and,
use and defensibility.

Goals of scenarios

Since predicting the future is not possible, it’s important to know that scenarios are not predictions. Instead, scenarios stimulate thinking and conversations about possible futures.

Key goals and purposes of scenarios can be any of the following:

Five principles of holistic science communication

April 17, 2020February 20, 2018

By Suzi Spitzer

How can we effectively engage in the practice and art of science communication to increase both public understanding and public impact of our science? Here I present five principles based on what I learned at the Science of Science Communication III Sackler Colloquium at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in November 2017.

1. Assemble a diverse and interdisciplinary team

Scientists should recognize that while they may be an expert on a particular facet of a complex problem, they may not be qualified to serve as an expert on all aspects of the problem. Therefore, scientists and communicators should collaborate to form interdisciplinary scientific teams to best address complex issues.
Science is like any other good or service—it must be strategically communicated if we want members of the public to accept, use, or support it in their daily lives. Thus, research scientists need to partner with content creators and practitioners in order to effectively share and “sell” scientific results.
Collaboration often improves decision making and problem solving processes. People have diverse cognitive models that affect the way each of us sees the world and how we understand or resolve problems. Adequate “thought world diversity” can help teams create and communicate science that is more creative, representative of a wider population, and more broadly applicable.

Let’s stop measuring and start improving

September 13, 2021October 24, 2017

By Louise Locock

When we’re trying to improve the experience of health care, social care and other services users, is there a fast, rigorous way to include their perspectives that doesn’t involve repeatedly collecting new data from them and their families?

Measuring, understanding and improving people’s experience of services has become a priority. There is now an international focus (at least in the West) on person-centred care. The English National Health Service has led the way among health systems by introducing the first nationally mandated patient survey.

Despite the strong political and organisational focus on improving care, reports of unsatisfactory experience continue in even the best funded care systems.

What’s in a name? The role of storytelling in participatory modeling

September 23, 2021June 13, 2017

By Alison Singer

That which we call a rose,
by any other name would smell as sweet.

That Shakespeare guy really knew what he was talking about. A rose is what it is, no matter what we call it. A word is simply a cultural agreement about what we call something. And because language is a common thread that binds cultures together, participatory modeling – as a pursuit that strives to incorporate knowledge and perspectives from diverse stakeholders – is prime for integrating stories into its practice.

To an extent, that’s what every modeling activity does, whether it’s through translating an individual’s story into a fuzzy cognitive map, or into an agent-based model. But I would argue that the drive to quantify everything can sometimes make us lose the richness that a story can provide.

Getting to a shared definition of a “good” solution in collaborative problem-solving

September 13, 2021January 12, 2017

By Doug Easterling

How can collaborative groups move past their divisions and find solutions that advance their shared notions of what would be good for the community?

Complex problems – such as how to expand access to high-quality health care, how to reduce poverty, how to remedy racial disparities in educational attainment and economic opportunity, and how to promote economic development while at the same time protecting natural resources – can’t be solved with technical remedies or within a narrow mindset. They require the sort of multi-disciplinary, nuanced analysis that can only be achieved by engaging a variety of stakeholders in a co-creative process.

Bringing together stakeholders with diverse perspectives allows for a comprehensive analysis of complex problems, but this also raises the risk of a divisive process.

Storytelling ethnography as a way of doing transdisciplinary research

January 7, 2022November 29, 2016

By Jane Palmer

Storytelling ethnography is a valuable tool if your research traverses several disciplines and aims for insights that transcend all of them. Stories not only integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, but can also “change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge” (Griffiths 2007).

The special qualities of transdisciplinarity are:

its potential for integrative inquiry and emergent solutions,
its engagement with community and other non-academic knowledges, and
the breadth of its outcomes for researchers, participants and the wider community.

These are also qualities of what I call storytelling ethnography.

Improving health care services through Experience-based Co-design

September 13, 2021October 20, 2016

By Glenn Robert and Annette Boaz

authors_glenn-robert_annette-boaz — 1. Glenn Robert (biography)
2. Annette Boaz (biography)

There is lots of talk about the potential of co-creation as an approach to improving public services, but what does it actually look like (and do) in practice?

We describe one specific approach that has been used extensively for improving the quality of health care services: Experience-based Co-design.

Key Features and Stages

Experience-based Co-design draws on elements of participatory action research, user-centred design, learning theory and narrative-based approaches to change.

The key features of Experience-based Co-design are that it:

places patients at the heart of a quality improvement effort working alongside staff to improve services
maintains a focus on designing experiences (not just systems or processes).

It has six stages.

Stage 1 involves establishing the governance and project management arrangements.

Models as narratives

April 15, 2022June 16, 2016

By Alison Singer

I don’t see the world in pictures. I mean, I see the world in all its beautiful shapes and colors and shadings, but I don’t interpret the world that way. I interpret the world through the stories I create. My interpretations of these stories are my own mental models of how I view the world. What I can do then, to share this mental model, is create a more formalized model, whether it is a simple picture (in my case a very badly drawn one), or a system dynamics model, or an agent-based model. People think of models as images, as representations, as visualizations, as simulations. As tools to represent, to simplify, to teach, and to share. And they are all these things, and we need them to function as these things, but they are also stories, and can be interpreted and shared as such.