In this blog I’m going to go a direction I haven’t previously. Maybe not so much a specific direction, but a meandering wander that I’ve been too afraid to go before. This has come about due to an excellent seminar I attended today, about academic blogging. Our seminar facilitator, Mimo Caenepeel, encouraged us to write a blog post without feeling the need to impress or reference extensively. So here goes – I’m going to write about some half-formed thoughts I’ve been having regarding transparency and intervention development without extensive research beforehand. No references, no asking my partner to read through it, just you, me and a (currently) blank page. My PhD methods are wholly participatory – more so than I initially anticipated them to be at the start of my PhD. They’ve moved in this direction as I’ve been developing my intervention, and for good reason. Co-production is an increasingly important tool of intervention development – it allows you to talk to your participants about their problems and potential solutions prior to creating an intervention. It increases acceptability and sustainability, which should lead to long term effectiveness. My PhD has co-production evident throughout: I formed a lay advisory group early and discuss key methods choices and results with them regularly; I spent several months interviewing key stakeholders about the problem my intervention aims to solve; and now I am planning on holding an online (!) workshop with participants to create an intervention that suits them. How transparent should I be with my participants? But a question I am now thinking about is… how transparent should I be with my participants? I suppose it’s important here to discuss what I mean by transparency. In the workshop that begins later this month, I want to work with participants to determine exactly how an intervention is going to increase their physical activity and how it will be implemented. This means I will be gaining consensus about changeable and important factors (e.g. barriers to physical activity) that the intervention will hopefully address. Then, we will work together to decide what exactly the intervention will look like. But should I be fully transparent in discussing each of these steps with participants? Such as explaining exactly what the theory of change is, why it’s important, and how we will go on to develop a theory of action. Or is it better to skim through the theory and jargon and just present to them intervention ideas that (I’ve found) may interrupt the theory of change causal pathway? Will participants appreciate the increased transparency? Or will I lose their interest there, or even upset them (for example, if it turns out that the problem is low self-esteem causes low physical activity levels…)? How much transparency in the intervention development methods are useful and appropriate? I don’t have an answer to this, but perhaps you do. What are your thoughts on transparency in the research process with participants who will eventually take part in the intervention? Best wishes and thanks as always for reading, Audrey
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Author. About.Audrey Buelo. PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. (Mostly) professional and research-related musings - with the odd cat picture. Archives
April 2019
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