Co-Production And Consensus: Doing Ethnography In a Collaborative Research Partnership

• In Event: TRANS-disciplinary Research Through STS Practice

Abstract

Collaborative research partnerships between researchers and policy-makers aim to improve the availability and quality of research evidence to policy makers. Through research co-production processes, partnership research brings together professionals with a range of disciplinary and policy backgrounds underpinned by different forms of expert knowledge and professional identities. This presentation discusses our experience working in a collaborative research partnership comprised of state-level administrators and policy-makers, representatives from local health districts, as well as a transdisciplinary team of university-based researchers. The partnership team is enabled by the NHMRC Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, which takes a systems approach to chronic disease prevention. We are studying the largest ever scale-up of primary school and early childhood service obesity prevention programs in Australia through conducting a multi-sited ethnography of an electronic monitoring system known as Population Health Information Management System across local health districts in NSW. In exploring what makes research collaborations effective, productive and satisfying programmes for all participants, we discuss some of the co-production strategies that have facilitated consensus among the group and consider why they have been effective. We highlight the importance of defining key policy concepts through collective conceptual work. We also consider some of the challenges that have emerged when mediating divergent understandings of the research data and how they have shaped our project as it has proceeded. We argue that in order to create meaningful change through collaborative research partnerships, the process of co-production and the co-creation of knowledge through STS practice must be described and interrogated as part of the overall research study methodology.

Author

• Victoria Loblay, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre