September 2024 Roundtable

What do we need to consider to further develop community-led action research? This is the question that brought together colleagues at an online event earlier this year.

Community-led action research is a process where the community decides on an issue to be researched, designs and carries out the research, and makes use of the results.

This online event aimed help us understand the issues that surround community-led action research in Scotland – and how we can use it as approach to empower communities and help develop improve knowledge and decision-making.

Slides

We were also delighted to have two fascinating inputs from Al Mathers from the Young Foundation and Chris Manion from the British Science Association - both of whom have kindly shared their slides from the day.

Breakout notes

The notes below reflect the breakout discussions from the day, and have been brought together into four key themes.

How we deliver community-led action research

  • Systems are a big factor e.g. research ethics – there is an opportunity in CLAR to explore more of a co-production approach to ethics. But requires skills and knowledge to do so.

  • Issues around remuneration – important, but also expensive. How do we value these contributions while also ensuring projects are viable?

  • Where you start and where you end up can be a very different.

  • Need to hardwire into the design to make sure that commitments are honoured

  • Money isn’t the only important thing – capacity is a huge issue. What’s the right level of co-production? Mistake to assume what the right level is? Can end up being even more extractive.

  • Issues around overresponsibilising communities – research is valuable, but need to ensure it’s done well and not extractive and truly community-led.

  • Avoid parachuting into communities and commit to longer-term relationships

Recognising its impact

  • Recognition and legitimacy of CLAR is key – there is a mandatory requirement for community involvement but it has to be mutual, and we need to look at incentives.

  • How we do recognise the status of CLAR? Increased rigor required? Useful to use existing frameworks and evaluation tools

  • What does the action look like? How does make it real with proper outcomes? And who listens to this? Creating a pathway from local priorities to policy action?

  • Consider different benefits/impact. For instance, in the research led by young people, the participants have gone on to make different decisions in their lives as a result, but also about influencing change at a systems level.

Building knowledge, confidence and skills

  •  Support for community researchers is crucial – particularly around sensitive issues and/or with vulnerable groups

  • Language – can be a big barrier, the ‘research’ word can put people off. We have an opportunity to reframe this in terms of ‘inquiry’ or ‘being curious’

  • Support isn't available across different settings / levels. Risks around making inequalities worse and being exclusionary. Workforce capacity important too

  • Skills gap in the learning pathway – taking people through to the research process and the resulting action can be difficult, and what is out there to support this?

  • Important to hear about people's failures - so much learning there, which is never publicised.  A closed confidential space would be positive.

  • Capacity building and support, not about us as researchers going in and extracting, but about shared ownership and equipping people with skills and embedding learning so can do it themselves. On this note, the train the trainer model is interesting.

  • Embedding learning into the process so people can do for selves and have skills to do that.

Resourcing community-led action research

  • Current financial climate means it’s complex and difficult to support this work. And lack of community development teams / skillsets can inhibit this.

  • Research should be the start of the journey, and create change should be the aim. Short-term funding cycles are a barrier in terms of not being able to carry on work afterwards. Need to be clear about time it’s going to take.

  • Length of time for CLAR is important – particularly to achieve the research outcomes. Funders need to recognise this – is there a case for matching funders to support different elements of CLAR? Noted that the funding should follow the research rather than the other way round.

  • Community capacity – still a need for robust resourcing of CLAR and recognition of the time, work and effort involved

  • Further explore and develop models where funding goes to community groups 

Next steps

We see community-led action research as a key element of putting community development practice at the heart of how decisions are made in our communities. We’ll be continuing to promote this approach over the coming months, and will be exploring with partners and colleagues what the future of this activity could look like.