Empowering older people to be active researchers, thought-leaders and influencers

If you have registered for this event and not received an email confirmation, please contact Heather Williams on h.williams@bath.ac.uk immediately.

User engagement is crucial to research quality.  Listening to users with different perspectives can enhance the quality of research projects and help to make findings more robust, relevant and applicable. User engagement is also a fundamental requirement for many research funding calls. Even basic research projects can benefit from understanding how in the long-term outcomes might benefit peoples’ lives through improved policy and design. Engaging with end-users i.e. older people themselves is particularly important but can be challenging.

In the past (and currently in some clinical research settings), researchers have often regarded users as passive subjects, with older people being experimented upon or tested in some way - rather than being fully engaged in the research process. This workshop will present a number of examples of current research where end-user participation is an integral part of the research approach and philosophy and which have involved and empowered research participants in many ways. Indeed the programme will include presentations by older people describing research they have designed and conducted themselves – and the training they sought in order to do this.   The varied roles of older people as initiators, enablers, designers and influencers of research will be examined. We will explore and investigate the merits and limitations of a variety of techniques.

To include:

• Using the creative potential of older people in design
• Older people as active participants, researchers and policy influencers
• Engaging older people on steering boards and research reference groups
• Training older people for active engagement in research
• Techniques for recruitment, participation and maintaining engagement

The programme can be found here.

Please follow the links for speaker's presentations (please note, copyrighted materials cannot be used without permission from the owner):

Professor David Frohlich - Using the creative potential of older people in design

Jo-Anne Bichard - The role of older people in designing: Part one, two and three

David Andrewes - Empowerment or engagement?

Diane Andrewes - How older people’s research can change policy

Dr Lorna Warren - Workshop and Video

Professor Carol Munn-Giddings - Older people as researchers: why not?

Other useful reading materials.