Community Engagement
We are committed to working closely with those most impacted by health and justice-related inequalities and to ensuring their voices are heard in research and policy work to shape Scotland's health and justice systems. We are conscious of our ethical obligations in asking participants about difficult personal experiences, and we will work to be inclusive and proportionate in our research practices.
We are taking the following approaches to community engagement:
- Early insights: In developing the proposal for this programme, we consulted people with experience of the Scottish justice system. They encouraged us to focus on experiences of health and other support services within communities because they felt these services are often not well connected, and to look at the experiences of people coming to the end of prison sentences and moving back into communities. They mentioned some of the difficulties they face in accessing new, or reconnecting with former, services and supports. Our research plans build on these suggestions.
- Building on existing community evidence: To ensure that we are not repeating insights already provided by communities in Scotland, we are committed to reviewing and building on existing evidence. Before we developed the proposal, we synthesised all the qualitative evidence we could find in which communities living in Scotland have been asked about the factors impacting on their health (see Journal of Critical Public Health). As the programme progresses, we will update this health-focused review to ensure that we are incorporating any new research as well as integrating community focused research with a justice focus. Our early conversations with people will also ask about previous research engagement, helping us to ensure we are not reproducing existing insights.
- Working with peer-researchers and co-inquiry groups: For both our community-focused research and our research in prisons, we will adopt collaborative approaches. Peer researchers will be supported to conduct research activity in prison and community settings. We are committed to ensuring that our peer-researchers benefit from the programme, through training opportunities as well as by being financially compensated for their time.
- Collaborating with the Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC): Our community-focused research is being undertaken collaboratively with SCDC, who work directly with local community groups and organisations. SCDC are a leading community development organisation in Scotland, and we share their commitment to equitable and inclusive approaches to community development and research with, or led by, communities. SCDC have extensive experience of recruiting, training and supporting community members facing multiple disadvantages to plan, carry out and make use of their own research. Their experience comes from work delivering a range of community-led action research and participatory research programmes. This includes the National Lottery-funded programme, Knowledge is Power, in partnership with the Poverty Alliance, the Community Participatory Action Research (CPAR) programme in Southeast England, and work in 2024-25 to support community groups across Scotland to conduct research into suicide prevention to help inform Scotland's Suicide Prevention Plan, Creating Hope Together.
- Taking a solutions focus: We are committed to ensuring that, over time, the community focused research evolves from questions about people's experiences to discussions about the kinds of changes that they would like to see. This will be the central focus of community focus groups and co-inquiry groups, which will also explore the pathways through which these changes offer the potential to improve health and justice outcomes. Proposals for changes that could make a meaningful difference to people's lives will also form part of the PhD research exploring people's accounts of transitioning from the end of long sentences back into community life, and of the PhD research examining peer-support for people using drugs in Scottish prisons.
- Amplifying voice and impact: The programme team are committed to using the insights from this research to try to influence policy and practice in ways that support and improve the experiences of Scottish communities who have been most impacted by health and justice-related inequalities. While we cannot guarantee that the programme proposals will be acted upon, we will proactively share findings and work closely with our Impact Advisory Board to maximise opportunities for impact throughout. In the final year of the programme, we will also bring key stakeholders together to consider what action can be taken in response to programme insights.
- Ongoing feedback: Within the five-year programme, we will ensure that we report back to those who engage with the research. For example, we will check that focus group participants and co-inquiry group members agree that formal outputs are accurate before they are finalised and shared with others. Where local groups or networks of individuals are actively involved in the research, we will share high-level programme findings on an ongoing basis to inform processes of finding local solutions. We are also committed to accessibly feeding back to stakeholders in the local areas in which our research is being conducted (e.g. via multi-stakeholder Criminal Justice Partnerships). By working with the Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research, we will also ensure that key team members remain contactable, beyond the end of the funded programme.