Tales of the unexpected?

There’s a lot to discuss around evaluating involvement and I’m looking forward to some excellent conversations next week at the Evaluation Conference in Newcastle.

One of the questions I suggest needs addressing is ‘How do we capture the unexpected?’ The way that involvement makes a difference is often a surprise, particularly for researchers.

For example, one researcher I spoke to about his project on Parkinson’s disease, told me how he took his patient information sheet to a panel of patients and carers expecting they would help make the information easier to understand. But the panel said ‘No you’re fine. This information is really well written. We don’t have any suggested changes for the wording, but we do have a worry that you’re planning to interview people on the phone. With Parkinson’s, some people’s voices become very weak which would make that difficult. Could you send them a survey instead or perhaps interview them in another way?’

Some of the guidance suggests that if the researcher starts out with a clear purpose for the involvement then they can put together a plan to evaluate it. That wouldn’t have worked in the example above – the outcome was nothing like what the researcher anticipated. He could have planned to evaluate the wrong thing. But he did learn something very useful and relevant to his research. He did change his method as a result.

I’m wondering if it might help to start with a different question. Rather than ‘How can I prove the involvement made a difference? it might be something like ‘How do I capture those moments that lead to change?’

Blog post #1: PPI. Learning it is. What can Yoda teach us about involvement in research?

Blog post #2: Researchers and the public as ‘thinking partners’. Why there’s no ‘method’ for involvement.

Blog post #3: Conflict as thinking. The challenge in working with different kinds of ‘thinking partners’.

Blog post #4: What is the purpose of involvement? To avoid bias in researchers’ thinking…

Blog post #5: Why try and objectify PPI? What gets lost in the process?