Abstract
Research partnership approaches are becoming popular within spinal cord injury (SCI) health research system, providing opportunities to explore experiences of and learn from SCI research partnership champions. This study aimed to explore and describe SCI researchers' and research users' (RU') experiences with and reasons for conducting and/or disseminating (health) research in partnership in order to gain more insight into potentially ways to build capacity for and foster change to support research partnerships within a health research system. Underpinned by a pragmatic perspective, ten semi-structured timeline interviews were conducted with researchers and RU who have experiences with SCI research partnerships. Interviews focused on experiences in participants' lives that have led them to become a person who conducts and/or disseminates research in partnership. Data were analysed using narrative thematic analysis. We identified three threads from participants' stories: (1) seeing and valuing different perspectives, (2) inspirational role models, and (3) relational and personal aspect of research partnerships. We identified sub-threads related to experiences that participants draw on how they came to be a person who engage in (health) research partnerships, and sub-threads related to participants' reasons for engaging in research partnerships. While most sub-threads were identified from both researchers' and RU' perspectives (eg, partnership successes and failures), some were unique for researchers (morally the right thing to do) or RU (advocating). Using a narrative and pragmatic approach, this study provided a new understanding of SCI researchers' and RU' partnership experiences over time. We found that participants' research partnership experiences and motivations align with components of leadership theories. The findings from this study may be used to inform strategies and policy programs to build capacity for conducting and disseminating (health) research in partnership, within and beyond SCI research.
Highlights
To address the well-described gap between research and practice or policy,[1,2] researchers, research users (RU), and funders have increasingly been focusing on ways to enhance the translation of health research to practice or policy settings.[3,4,5,6] Improving knowledge translation (KT) processes is important to ensure that research findings are accessible for people in society
From participants’ stories, we identified three potential strategies to build capacity for research partnership approaches within an (SCI) health research system
Our findings may be used by policy-makers and other research users to promote and improve research partnership approaches within a health research system
Summary
To address the well-described gap between research and practice or policy,[1,2] researchers, research users (RU), and funders have increasingly been focusing on ways to enhance the translation of health research to practice or policy settings.[3,4,5,6] Improving knowledge translation (KT) processes is important to ensure that research findings are accessible for people in society (eg, policy-makers, people with disabilities, healthcare professionals). A promising approach to enhance KT of health research findings is conducting and disseminating research in partnership with individuals or groups that will use or benefit from the research (ie, RU).[8,9] Depending on the research, RU may include individuals with lived experiences, clinicians, health and/or social service providers, community organizations, and/or industry partners.[8,10] Such research partnerships are increasingly being adopted within and outside the health domain as illustrated by the growing body of literature published on different types of research partnership approaches[11,12] (eg, integrated knowledge translation [IKT],8,13,14 community-based participatory research,[15] patient and public involvement16,17) in different areas (eg, public health, social sciences).[9,18] Because of the many potential benefits that research partnerships can have on the research, community/society and partnership,[9,17,19] organizations and funding agencies are increasingly promoting this approach.[3,6,20] researchers and RU can perceive many barriers to conducting research in partnership.[14,21,22,23,24] Barriers have been reported on different levels, including the individual-level (eg, lack of understanding about partnership process, lack of partnership skills14), the partnership (eg, power imbalances21), the research process (eg, required time commitment22), and the research system (eg, lack of resources[25])
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