Part 1: Exploring Impacts - Overview
Assessing the impact of public involvement in research is far from straightforward. Public involvement in research is a complex social process comprising separate elements that are essential for the processes to work properly but it often isn't clear how they affect the impacts public involvement can have. This complexity means:
- It is unlikely that public involvement carried out in the same way would achieve the same impacts across different research projects
- It is difficult to generalise from methods used in one impact assessment to another or to generalise about the findings of different studies of impacts
- Diversity of the public who are involved and the aims of and context for involvement make it hard to predict where involvement will have the greatest impact
- It is very difficult to attribute specific impacts to public involvement in general or to different types of involvement is very difficult.
The main elements that influence public involvement in research and the impact this involvement can have are identified in PiiAF.
