Evaluating and reporting
It is important to evaluate your public involvement activities to understand the impact of involvement on both your research and the people involved. It will also help you to learn from your involvement activities which can inform your next project and be shared with others.
Developing a plan on how you will evaluate involvement across your project should be done early. You should think about:
- what you are aiming to achieve through the involvement of patients and the public
- what success might look like (you may wish to refer to the UK Standards for Public Involvement when thinking about this)
- how impact will be measured (both positive and negative - on the research project and on those involved)
At a minimum we recommend keeping notes from relevant meetings and conversations with the public, which you can collate in this template developed by the School for Primary Care Research. However, there are a number of tools to help researchers with the evaluation of their involvement activities:
- Public Involvement in Research Impact Toolkit (PIRIT; developed by Marie Curie Research Centre, Cardiff University)
- Cube Evaluation Framework
- Public Involvement Impact Assessment Framework (PiiAF)
Funders also will ask you to report on your public involvement and the impacts that it has had on your research, and on those involved. These reports can also be used to share best practices wider within the research community. The following tools have been developed to support researchers to report on their involvement activities.
Further Guidance:
- Things to consider if you are capturing the impact of involvement in research (Charities Research Involvement Group)
- Why impact matters in involvement (NPC)