Digital practices of engaged researchers

Dr Trevor Collins, The Open University

Dr Trevor Collins, The Open University

These pages are intended to help researchers consider the challenges of engaged research in order to review and adapt their own digital practices. We’ll start with the following definition:

“Engaged research encompasses the different ways that researchers meaningfully interact with various stakeholders over any or all stages of a research process, from issue formulation, the production or co-creation of new knowledge, to knowledge evaluation and dissemination.”

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement have developed the EDGE tool – a self-assessment tool for universities to review and develop their strategy to embed engaged practices. The EDGE tool uses the categories of people, purposes and processes. We’ll use the same categories here to help structure these resources. For each of the challenges identified here we provide questions to consider, a brief discussion of the issues involved, actions to think about and sources of further information.

If you have not previously been involved in engaged research you might want to start by identifying groups of people that have complementary expertise to yours and consider how your work addresses the issues that are of interest to them. If you can identify some mutual benefits you’ll have a firm basis for approaching them and developing a productive partnership.

To access the beta site for the other resources, select: Digital practices of engaged researchers

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