Abstract
This project employed community researchers as a means of improving community engagement around their Private Water Supplies (PWS) in rural Scotland. In this paper, we reflect on working with community researchers in terms of the benefits and challenges of the approach for future rural research that seeks to improve community engagement. The paper (1) critiques the involvement of community researchers for rural community engagement, drawing on the experiences in this project and (2) provides suggestions for good practice for working with community researchers in rural communities’ research. We offer some context in terms of the role of community members in research, the importance of PWS, our approach to community researchers, followed by the methodological approach and findings and our conclusions to highlight that community researchers can be beneficial for enhancing community engagement, employability, and social capital. Future community researcher approaches need to be fully funded to ensure core researchers can fulfil their duty of care, which should not stop when data collection is finished. Community researchers need to be supported in two main ways: as continuing faces of the project after the official project end date and to transfer their newly acquired skills to future employment opportunities.
Highlights
Community members are increasingly being employed within social research, within ethnographic research with specific ‘communities of interest’, for high public and policy interest topics such as healthcare (Mosavel et al, 2011; True et al, 2017)
These stakeholders may have been identified through snowball sampling; the community researchers were able to access higher numbers of community members to participate in workshops than we expected
We have reflected on the key benefits and challenges the core team observed from working with community researchers to improve local engagement around a particular topic, in this case, Private Water Supplies (PWS): a theme seen to be complex and one which water protection stakeholders had perceived was of little interest to their communities
Summary
Community members are increasingly being employed within social research, within ethnographic research with specific ‘communities of interest’, for high public and policy interest topics such as healthcare (Mosavel et al, 2011; True et al, 2017). Community researchers are ‘local residents from the case study areas who [are] employed to help carry out research on [a] project’ (Teedon et al, 2017: 1). Within these settings, community members, as community researchers, can play vital roles as community assets building trust and knowledge between researchers and the studied communities (True et al, 2011) because of their insider status (Devotta et al, 2016). The team comprised Creaney and Currie who had the experience of working with rural communities, Teedon who had the experience of employing community researchers in hard to reach topics and Helwig, an expert in water quality. The findings of the paper have been informed by multiple and ongoing discussions and exchanges with the community researchers throughout the project
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