Authentic PPIE – the (re)search for authentic engagement

Some people who visit this blog will already be researchers or involved in research. But some of you might not be, and I don’t want to exclude anyone by making assumptions about what you know, or what your experience might be.

So here are some explanations and descriptions which might be useful!

Research is the process of answering a question. It’s how we go about getting information to help us understand something better, or to solve a problem.

If you’re looking for a new air fryer on Google, you’re doing research.

If you’re asking people for recommendations for a good plumber, you’re doing research.

If you’ve been told you need to lose some weight and change your diet, and you start looking for healthier recipes, you’re doing research.

So, you can already see that research is something many of us already do in every day life.

“But that’s not real research! What about the people in lab coats and the ones spending ages reading stuff in libraries?” I hear you cry. Well, that’s research too. The difference is that it happens in a particular context (i.e. a university or a hospital) and it might be funded by a grant, so the process of research has to follow particular rules in how it’s done and who is allowed to be involved.

I worked in the NHS for nearly seven years, so a lot of the research projects I supported were clinical research. These are projects which are asking questions about medical or scientific things like: “How does a particular medicine affect a certain group of people?” or “If we do surgery with the help of a robotic device, will it be better than the usual way we do it?”

There are other types of research, for almost any kind of setting: history, buildings, music, plants, fashion, languages….the list is incredibly long! And the research can be done in different ways:

• it could be a quantitative study, looking at the quantity of things (numbers and stats)
• it could be qualitative, looking at the quality of things (how people feel; their experiences, perceptions, opinions)
• It could be a systematic review – this is when someone looks at existing research papers and articles to try and find out about something and uses a particular set of rules to guide what they’re looking for and which papers they’ll choose.
• It could be a thematic review, where they’re looking to see if certain themes come up in academic papers and articles, or a narrative review, looking to see what stories are told and by whom in academic papers.
• You can also have a scoping review. This is when you’re literally reading all sorts of papers that have been chosen because they matched a keyword search (like the air fryer search on Google, but with different categories) and you’re just pulling out any similar points which they all feature – and anything which might be consistently missing.
• In the NHS you can also have a retrospective study, where you’re looking at data from the past to see if there are any patterns or trends. A retrospective study can also be non-interventional – that is, no-one is going to take any action to intervene in patient care, but just see what the can learn from the data.
• An interventional study is when you do take action and intervene – for example during the height of the COVID pandemic, the RECOVERY trial invited patients who had been hospitalised with COVID to take part in the study. If they agreed to take part (they gave their consent) then they would be allocated to one of the study treatment options (all of which were already known to be safe for people), to see if it made any difference to their recovery from COVID. The results of the RECOVERY trial helped us to quickly learn which existing medicines were most effective for treating COVID.
• Another type of research style is observational. That is when you are observing – just watching or listening – to what is happening in a particular situation. An example of this might be when someone says “None of the patients in our hospital like peas in their evening meal.” We don’t know for sure if this is true, or whether the person who said that has just made an assumption. So, an observational study could be set up, where someone visits the wards at dinner time every day for two weeks, to see if patients do eat their peas or not. They might also decide to run a survey of patients to see what they think about hospital food. Over the two weeks the researcher comes in to watch what people do at mealtimes, and whether they do ignore the peas or not? At the end of the study, they’ll count how many people ate peas, compared with any people who chose not to.
• The number of people who were counted eating peas – or not – is the data, the evidence which answers the question. Without evidence we can’t prove that something is true, useful or effective. Without evidence, it’s just guesswork – even posh, unproven guess work.

If you want to know more about research in healthcare, there’s a free online course you can try called Improving Healthcare through Clinical Research. I found it very useful when I first started working in the NHS and it gave me a really good introduction to healthcare research.