Working with community researchers to enhance rural community engagement around Private Water Supplies : an exploration of the benefits and challenges
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
Citation
Creaney , R , Currie , M , Teedon , P & Helwig , K 2020 , ' Working with community researchers to enhance rural community engagement around Private Water Supplies : an exploration of the benefits and challenges ' , Qualitative Research , vol. Online First . https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120978883
Publication
Qualitative Research
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1468-7941Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access article. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Description
Funding: CREW: Scotland's centre of expertise for waters; the Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme (2016-2021).Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
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