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. 2025 May 8;11(1):44.
doi: 10.1186/s40900-025-00714-2.

Coproducing justice in public involvement: impact-led iterative development of a dance based community engagement project building relationships in marginalised communities

Rebecca Pritchard  1 , Natalie Darko  2 , Elizabeth Stevenson  3
Affiliations

Coproducing justice in public involvement: impact-led iterative development of a dance based community engagement project building relationships in marginalised communities

Rebecca Pritchard et al. Res Involv Engagem. .

Abstract

Background: Public involvement must include people from diverse backgrounds, or it risks exacerbating health inequalities in prioritising the needs of the majority culture. Public involvement as a process tends to exclude people by being tailored to fit the norms of the dominant culture; therefore simply removing barriers to participation is unlikely to be effective as is the case in other areas of science engagement. Rather it is necessary to go beyond redistributive justice (fair distribution of resources, opportunities, and benefits within health research) towards relational justice (developing respectful, reciprocal relationships and fair treatment within the research process and seeking to develop models of involvement that are meaningful and appealing to all groups).

Methods: An action research approach was applied to the iterative development of an arts based participatory community engagement project to engage South Asians in Leicester, particularly women from inter-sectionally deprived neighbourhoods. Seven action research cycles were completed between 2017 and 2024, of which the first five are reported here. Data collection and analysis are summarised in Supplementary Table 01 and a project summary can be seen in Supplementary Fig. 01.

Results: The impacts of the project were considerably broader than simply developing engagement with, and access to under-represented communities. The project was empowering for participating women and supported the development of social capital. It is emphasised that this is an impact associated with participatory community engagement that moves in the direction of coproduction.

Discussion: Community engagement using an arts-based approach was effective at engaging under-represented communities in health science involvement. It also offered the potential to build social capital that impacted health inequalities in tangible ways aligned with macro-level policy. Community engagement can also therefore be viewed as an efficient use of investment in offering significant added value.

Keywords: Action research; Community engagement; Dance; Ethnic minority; Impact assessment; Public involvement; Social capital; Underserved communities.

Plain language summary

Health researchers often work with publics to make sure they develop research that is important, and is designed to make taking part in research as easy as possible. However, most of the people who work with health researchers in this way are from white ethnic backgrounds, over the age 55 and from middle to high income groups . This often means that research could be designed in ways that don’t necessarily meet the needs of other groups, and those groups end up being less researched. It is therefore important that health researchers try to include lots of different people in public involvement. Efforts to understand what stops people from under-represented groups taking part hasn’t led to improvements. Researchers in Leicester developed a community arts project using a model called action research. This just means that researchers planned a version of the project, tried it out, measured success, and then thought about how to make it better. Importantly, we tried to incorporate any existing theories or ideas as they became relevant. We tried this model over seven cycles of action research. We found that Asian style dance was effective at engaging South Asian women who worked with the researcher and took part in public involvement. We also found that using this type of community engagement, instead of something like a committee, helped us build good relationships with participating women, and empowered them to build social capital (social resources like friendships, networks, and even investment) within their wider communities. This is particularly important, because it shows that using community engagement to support public involvement has benefits for communities as well as for researchers.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethical approval and consent to participate: Ethical review of the research component of the project was undertaken by the Social Research Ethics Group at the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Sagor’s [1] model of action research
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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