Over the summer, the Sheffield School for Social Care Research (SSCR) recruited their first Undergraduate interns, teaming up with the University’s SURE scheme. Our internship funding helps us deliver on our aim to support talented Undergraduates to gain experience in applied adult social care research, and provide students with the opportunity to undertake a discrete and meaningful research activity that will result in a high quality research experience. We were absolutely delighted by the engagement, commitment and talent demonstrated by our first three interns and in this blog series, you can read about their experiences in their own words.
Next in our 3 part series, we have Wanqi (Kiki) Hou, a second year student in Sociological Studies who completed a project called Mapping Public Involvement and Co-production and Its Impact in Social Care Research, supervised by Kadi Bouyzourn, SSCR PEI and Co-production Associate.
Of her experience, Kiki says:
As part of the SURE programme this summer, I joined the NIHR School for Social Care Research under the supervision of Dr Kadija Bouyzourn and Professor Peter Bath. My project brought together evidence from six Sheffield-based SSCR research projects to examine how public involvement and co-production were being put into practice. I developed a comparative approach to mapping that traced who was involved, the roles they held, how they contributed to the research, and how those activities connected with outputs, knowledge exchange and potential routes to impact. Bringing this material together gave me a cross-project view of how involvement was being approached and where recurring patterns began to emerge.
Working across the six projects showed me that building the map was only the first stage of the analysis. By bringing different forms of involvement into one comparative view, recurring patterns and differences became easier to recognise, so the work began to offer more than a simple summary of project information. It could also provide a useful basis for cross-project learning and future discussion within SSCR. At the same time, the process changed how I approached the evidence myself. I became more careful about how confidently I described involvement and impact, especially when the available material pointed to potential developments rather than outcomes that had already been demonstrated.
Mapping public involvement in practice
My starting point was the project documentation. The six SSCR-funded studies covered very different areas of adult social care, ranging from neurodisability in prisons and sexual rights in care homes to family care transitions and future planning for people with learning disabilities. The range itself was useful; it meant I could not apply the same assumptions across every project. For each project, I looked at who was involved and what role they had in the research. This turned out to be more complicated than I expected. As I read across different documents, it was not always immediately clear what people had contributed or at what stage they had become involved. I also mapped activities and outputs connected to different groups, and tried to trace where the research might lead beyond the immediate team.
One distinction that helped was separating involvement activities from outputs, and outputs from intended or potential routes to impact. A workshop, for example, could be a space where people contributed knowledge directly to the research. An Easy Read resource or toolkit might then help that knowledge reach a wider audience at a later stage. Keeping those stages distinct made it easier to compare projects that were organised in very different ways. The literature on public involvement gave me a framework for interpreting what I was seeing. NIHR describes public involvement as research carried out with or by members of the public, rather than research done to, about or for them. In practice, I found that knowing whether people were involved was only part of the picture. I also needed to ask when they became involved, what they were being asked to contribute, and how much influence they had over the research process. Those questions became harder to answer the more carefully I looked.
Looking beyond labels
Through the mapping, I came to appreciate that terms such as public involvement, co-design and co-production describe different ways of working with people. They can overlap, but they are not interchangeable. What mattered was not simply whether people with lived experience were involved, but what role they had and how far that involvement extended through the research process. The Neurodisability in Prisons project helped make this distinction much clearer to me. Four serving prisoners with neurodisability are being trained and supported as co-researchers. Their role goes beyond contributing views at a single point. They are involved in shaping the research, carrying out peer interviews, contributing to analysis and taking part in dissemination, with support from Revolving Doors, including co-designed training and peer supervision.
Seeing those roles described across different stages of the project gave me a more practical understanding of what co-production can involve. NIHR guidance describes it as researchers, practitioners and members of the public working together while sharing power and responsibility across the research process. That definition had felt abstract before. Working through an actual project made it easier to see what it required in practice. From that point, I became more careful about applying labels based only on the presence of public involvement. When people were described as "involved," I found myself asking at what stage, in what capacity, and with how much influence over the research. The terminology only becomes meaningful when it reflects what people are actually doing.
Thinking about how research makes a difference
Another part of the mapping involved looking at how research was shared beyond the immediate project team. As I worked through the project documents, I came across outputs designed for different audiences: Easy Read materials, short films, workshops and practical toolkits. Looking at these alongside more traditional academic outputs made me think more carefully about what happens to research once findings have been produced. I had previously tended to associate research impact with a visible outcome at the end of a project. Through the mapping, I began to see a longer process. How findings are communicated affects who can engage with them, and knowledge exchange creates opportunities for research evidence and lived experience to move between researchers and the people who might actually use that knowledge. This also helped me understand the emphasis placed on accessible and actionable research in SSCR’s Knowledge Exchange and Impact Strategy.
Thinking about impact also required some caution. Several of the projects I reviewed were relatively short scoping studies, and measurable long-term outcomes were not always something that could reasonably be expected at that stage. I learned to separate evidence of an outcome that had already occurred from an intended or potential route to impact. It was a small distinction, but it mattered. It reminded me that describing impact also means being clear about what the available evidence can actually support.
How this internship inspired me
This internship has made me think about how the questions raised through mapping could be taken further. My work was mainly qualitative, but it also showed me the potential of using quantitative methods to explore patterns across a larger number of projects. I became interested in how different methods might complement each other and offer new ways of understanding public involvement and its development over time.
More broadly, the experience has encouraged me to keep exploring research from different methodological perspectives. I hope to carry this interest into future projects and continue developing the skills needed to examine these questions in greater depth.
I am grateful to Dr Kadija Bouyzourn and Professor Peter Bath for their guidance throughout, and to colleagues across SSCR and the SURE programme for their support in making this experience possible.