Organizational participatory research: a systematic mixed studies review exposing its extra benefits and the key factors associated with them

Abstract

BackgroundIn health, organizational participatory research (OPR) refers to health organization members participating in research decisions, with university researchers, throughout a study. This non-academic partner contribution to the research may take the form of consultation or co-construction. A drawback of OPR is that it requires more time from all those involved, compared to non-participatory research approaches; thus, understanding the added value of OPR, if any, is important. Thus, we sought to assess whether the OPR approach leads to benefits beyond what could be achieved through traditional research.MethodsWe identified, selected, and appraised OPR health literature, and at each stage, two team members independently reviewed and coded the literature. We used quantitative content analysis to transform textual data into reliable numerical codes and conducted a logistic regression to test the hypothesis that a co-construction type OPR study yields extra benefits with a greater likelihood than consultation-type OPR studies.ResultsFrom 8873 abstracts and 992 full text papers, we distilled a sample of 107 OPR studies. We found no difference between the type of organization members’ participation and the likelihood of exhibiting an extra benefit. However, the likelihood of an OPR study exhibiting at least one extra benefit is quadrupled when the impetus for the study comes from the organization, rather than the university researcher(s), or the organization and the university researcher(s) together (OR = 4.11, CI = 1.12–14.01). We also defined five types of extra benefits.ConclusionsThis review describes the types of extra benefits OPR can yield and suggests these benefits may occur if the organization initiates the OPR. Further, this review exposes a need for OPR authors to more clearly describe the type of non-academic partner participation in key research decisions throughout the study. Detailed descriptions will benefit others conducting OPR and allow for a re-examination of the relationship between participation and extra benefits in future reviews.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13012-017-0648-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Conceptualising the initiation of researcher and research user partnerships: a meta-narrative review

“…In other words, the benefits of researcher and research user partnerships may not be realised if flourishing partnerships are not established at the outset. While previous reviews [9] and concept analyses [10,11,16,17] of researcher and research user partnerships have been published, none of those specifically assessed partnership initiation in depth. Bush et al [17] concluded that co-creation partnerships, that is, partnerships to co-create knowledge, initiated by research user organisations appear to have greater beneficial outcomes than consultative type partnerships initiated by either universities or research user organisations.…”

Participatory implementation research in the field of migrant health: Sustainable changes and ripple effects over time

“…In Ireland, the practice manager explained that practitioners were more aware of migrants' issues, but there had been no change in the actual practice during consultations (Ire10, 13,14). While the doctors knew that using a trained interpreter was the correct thing to do, they still did not have resources from the health service to do so.…”

“…This is in line with the review by Bush et al that revealed a range of positive yet unanticipated effects of participatory research projects. 13 That review also underscored the need for all partners to agree on the importance of the research focus. Even more importantly, the likelihood of a participatory project exhibiting at least one extra benefit is quadrupled when the impetus for the study comes from a community organization.…”

“…Even more importantly, the likelihood of a participatory project exhibiting at least one extra benefit is quadrupled when the impetus for the study comes from a community organization. 13 RESTORE was instigated by academics; thus, support for this community impetus would be a recommendation for further participatory research projects.…”

“…7,[9][10][11][12] There is also increasing recognition of the importance of the role patients/public may play in the broader, macro-level context that shapes organizational capacity and willingness to take action to support implementation of changes in health-care settings. 1,6,13 In this paper, we provide results of a follow-up study of an earlier investigation that combined NPT with PLA in primary care implementation research.…”