And finally...
It is also useful to begin to think about how you will disseminate the findings of your impact assessment at an early stage. Possible audiences include:
- Members of the public involved in your research and researchers on your team
- The funders of your research and other research funders
- Other members of the public with experience of being involved in research
- The wider academic community, policy makers and the wider public
You need to think carefully about the way you present your results to different audiences. You may want to use different methods to give feedback to the public who have been involved in your research than you would to inform the wider academic community. You also need to make sure that the quality of your reporting is good. Common problems with reporting of public involvement1 include a lack of detail on:
- The way public involvement has been defined in the study
- The way in which public involvement happened
- The methods used to assess the impact of public involvement (including any economic appraisal of impact if appropriate)
- The context in which the public involvement took place and how this may have affected the impacts being assessed.
- The impacts and outcomes being assessed.
In addition, it is also important to identify how your work links with and builds on the existing body of work on public involvement and assessments of its impact in order to ensure that the evidence base on the impact of public involvement in research is strengthened.
1Staniszewska, S., Brett, J., Mockford, C., & Barber, R. (2011). The GRIPP checklist: strengthening the quality of patient and public involvement reporting in research. International Journal Of Technology Assessment In Health Care, 27(4), 391-399.
