Kelsey Wuerstl, Miranda A. Cary, Katrina Plamondon, Davina Banner-Lukaris, Nelly Oelke, Kathryn M. Sibley, Kristy Baxter, Mathew Vis-Dunbar, Alison M. Hoens, Ursula Wick, Stefan Bigsby and Heather Gainforth
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Building consensus in research partnerships: a scoping review of consensus methods’.
When reading articles describing a collaborative research decision, such as a research partnership creating a list of research priorities, we often read the statement, ‘The research partnership came to consensus’. But what does this statement actually mean – what is consensus, what does it mean to come to consensus, and how did the research partnership come to consensus?
Research partnerships are characterised by researchers and research users engaged in a collaborative research project to enhance the relevance and usefulness of research findings. Consensus methods require group members to develop and agree to support a solution that is in the group’s best interest. However, simply doing partnered research and using consensus methods does not guarantee the research addresses the priorities of those most affected, nor that inclusion and power dynamics have been considered. Consensus methods are often poorly reported and missing crucial information about how the research partnership made decisions about the project, as well as how issues of inclusion, equity and power dynamics were navigated.
We conducted a scoping review to better understand how research partnerships use consensus methods in health research and how these research partnerships navigate inclusion and power dynamics. Our findings, published in Evidence & Policy, identified six recommendations to enhance the quality of research teams’ consensus methods.
1. Identify a diverse team of researchers and research users who can meaningfully benefit from your consensus project.
Identify who your partners are and outline their role(s) in the project together. Partners can include patients, care providers, or community-based organisations, to name a few. Through discussions with your partners, you will identify how each partner wants to be meaningfully engaged in the research design, conduct and/or analysis of the consensus research. It is important to remember that not all partners will want to be involved at all stages of the project – it’s about equity rather than equality. In these discussions, you will also want to discuss diversity and inclusion – who is not at the table that should be and how will all partnership members’ input be included.Finally, you’ll want to discuss power over decision-making and conduct of the consensus project. These discussions will include identifying power dynamics and being transparent and open about how decisions about the project will be made.
2. Identify your partnership approach
You will want to identify your approach to your partnership. Some examples of partnership approaches include community-based participatory research (CBPR), integrated knowledge translation (IKT) and patient and public involvement/engagement (PPI/E). When you identify your partnership approach, you will also identify your partnership philosophy, research paradigm, worldview and values as a team. These aspects will outline what is important to you as a team and why the team makes the decisions it does.
3. Explicitly discuss and transparently report the research partnership’s decision-making process to determine what constitutes consensus
Transparency in a team’s research decisions is key to reproducible or transferable research findings. This includes outlining apriori metrics and how those measures might have changed throughout the process. Another way to support transparency is to register pre-analysis plans, which provide information about the type of study, source of the data, how the variables will be constructed, and any problems that may arise and how they will be addressed throughout the project. Analysis plans can be registered on Open Science Framework or another discipline-specific site (e.g. American Economic Associations’ registry for RCTs).
4. Consider the feasibility, benefits and challenges of facilitating different consensus methods
When selecting the appropriate consensus method for your project, the costs and benefits of modes of delivery and aspects of facilitation are important to consider. You will want to consider the cost/benefits of different modes of delivery. Online modes of delivery are often more accessible and inclusive but may have lower engagement than a face-to-face or in-person mode of delivery.You might also need to consider the costs/benefits of using an internal vs. external facilitator. External facilitators are beneficial for navigating partnerships and power but can be costly.
5. Carefully consider the pros and cons of different consensus methods
Once you have identified how you will be conducting your consensus project and the type of facilitation your team be using, you can start to narrow down and identify the consensus method itself. Consult repositories of different consensus methods to create a short list of options.Consider if any blindspots are associated with any of the consensus methods. Present the options to the partnership and assess each method’s methodological coherence with the partnership approach.
6. Reporting guidance needs to be established for consensus methods both within and outside of research partnership work
A common approach to improving transparency is to use a reporting checklist (e.g. PRISMA, CONSORT).When possible, show the steps the research partnership took using a reporting checklist. If one is unavailable for your specific project, you might modify an existing one or create one that addresses your needs. Report whether there were any deviations from standard methods or your analysis plan. Word/space limits in journals are often a barrier to complete and transparent reporting. When this is the case, provide this information in an appendix, supplementary file, or on another repository (e.g. Open Science Framework).
Our study highlighted the lack of consistent reporting on the consensus methods used by research partnerships. Our findings are a first step to improving the quality of consensus methods and will hopefully lead to creating a consensus methods taxonomy or repository and evidence-based reporting guidelines specific to use in partnered research.
Image credit: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Cary, M.A. Plamondon, K. Banner-Lukaris, D. Oelke, N. Sibley, K.M. Baxter, K. Vis-Dunbar, M. Hoens, A.M. Wick, U. Bigsby, S. Wuerstl, K. and Gainforth, H. (2022). Building consensus in research partnerships: a scoping review of consensus methods. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16645354235140.
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