The Dialogue and Change Award
The Dialogue and Change Award was a pilot scheme that helped us to evaluate the impact of Public Involvement and Community Engagement across our activities.
The principles of public involvement and community engagement are well established and the benefits to research are also well documented.
As an Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), we are committed to establishing high quality public involvement and community engagement (PICE) at all levels across the ARC – including within each of the ARC Research Themes and at an individual research project level.
We want to ensure that our PICE activities are impactful and transformational – and that they help to shape the way that research is designed, conducted and implemented.
Piloting a new approach to evaluate impact
As part of this ongoing commitment, we completed a pilot model of evaluating the impact of PICE.
This model draws upon the experience of Investing in Children, an independent children’s rights organisation based in the North East of England, which has developed an approach to service improvement by embracing meaningful and sustained dialogue with service users (in this case children and young people) as part of the process of research, service design and review.
We have used the ‘Investing in Children Membership Award’ and you can find out more about that award, on their website at www.investinginchildren.net
We used the principles and template of the Investing in Children Membership Award to create a new quality assurance standard, the Dialogue and Change Award that provided evidence that research projects are engaging the public/communities in an active dialogue about the design and delivery of their services, or in the case of research, that the research process itself has been the subject of dialogue and improvement.
How did the process work?
The process involved a dedicated, experienced member of the Investing in Children (IiC) allocated to the project. Discussions took place between the IiC assessor and the research team in which the strength of the evidence of meaningful PICE was considered.
This included conversations with public members who were involved in the research, who provided evidence of dialogue and change.
These conversations focussed on things such as collective decision making and/or individual decision making, and to what extent the public members felt their contributions had been taken into account and had made a meaningful contribution to the research project. This was then developed into a report.
The people who contributed to the conversations were then invited to check the report and approve its recommendations. If the evidence was positive, and they endorsed the conclusions, then a Dialogue and Change Award was given to the project.
You can read case studies from projects that successfully achieved the Dialogue and Change Award, below.
If you have any questions about the Dialogue and Change Award, please email Dr Felicity Shenton, PICE Manager for the ARC NENC – [email protected]
