Reports and reviews

Reviewing the People’s Principles and how they relate to other Involvement frameworks and standards

on this page
  1. Introduction
  2. People's Principles for Involvement in Research and Development (R&D)
  3. Reviewing the four People’s Principles
  4. How we reviewed the People’s Principles
  5. Results and conclusions
  6. Download the detailed results

The NCCPE was commissioned by CaSE in January 2024 to work with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to design and run a public dialogue to explore society’s stake in UK research. The goal was to explore the public’s views and help the sector work towards a vision for a stronger relationship between the public and the R&D community.

This resource shares our approach to reviewing the People's Principles alongside other frameworks, and a summary of the results. The detailed results can be downloaded at the end of this page as a PDF or word document. 

updated on 18 Oct 2024
5 minutes read

Introduction

The design of the dialogue was informed by widespread consultation with the R&D sector, including through workshops with more than 50 organisations across the UK, CaSE’s public opinion research and advice from an expert group convened for this project.

33 participants took part in ten hours of dialogue across four online sessions, hearing from subject specialists and being provided with information on how the public can influence decisions about R&D and be involved in all stages of research itself. They then iteratively developed a set of People’s Principles for Involvement in R&D. The Principles are a key output from the project. The process by which they were developed is outlined in the NatCen project report. CaSE have also produced a separate report, in which they outline a set of recommendations and next steps for the R&D sector, laying out a ‘call to action’ based upon the findings from the dialogue.

Access the CaSE and NatCen reports

People's Principles for Involvement in Research and Development (R&D)

1

Public Involvement in R&D should use the public's expertise to benefit the participants, the research and wider society.

2

Public involvement in R&D should provide everything that participants need to feel properly informed.

3

Public Involvement in R&D should involve the right number of people with a range of experiences.

4

Public involvement in R&D should ensure that participants feel safe, heard, and invested in the research.

Reviewing the four People’s Principles

One of the recommendations in the CaSE project report is that the People's Principles might be used by the sector to audit their own activity and inform their own actions. We felt it was important therefore to contextualise and ‘sense check’ them against the wider involvement literature, recognising that the principles are entering a relatively crowded space. We noted: 

  • There has been a long-standing interest in how public involvement might be increased and improved in a host of different sectors, including health, politics and education
  • There has also been a range of projects to increase the quality and impact of public involvement in R&D (for instance through the Sciencewise programme, which has been commissioning dialogues on a host of emerging areas of science and technology for two decades)

This activity has resulted in in a proliferation of tools, frameworks and standards to describe the characteristics of good involvement practice, and an extensive academic literature, covering both R&D and other areas of public life. 

We have undertaken this review with two ends in mind:

  • To ensure that the People’s Principles are not viewed in isolation but as a contribution to a much broader movement to increase participation and involvement, which we hope they will help to scale up 
  • To identify if and how they align with or diverge from widely accepted good practice in involvement, to ensure they are adopted wisely and to identify overlaps and gaps

How we reviewed the People’s Principles

To sense check the People’s Principles, the NCCPE undertook a rapid review of the wider involvement literature, informed by the Centre’s own practical experience and expertise in the topic: the NCCPE was established in 2008 to act as a centre of expertise in engagement and involvement in the HE sector. Building on this experience:

  • We reviewed the People’s Principles alongside eight widely used frameworks for public involvement to see how closely they matched. 
  • We used ChatGPT to identify the cross-cutting themes and principles from the wider literature around public involvement, which we compared with the People’s Principles.

The detailed results are shared below. 

Results and conclusions

In summary, what the review revealed was:

1. Very significant alignment between the People’s Principles and widely accepted standards and principles for public involvement.

The People’s Principles address all of the commonly accepted principles that underpin good involvement, as manifested in the existing frameworks, standards and wider involvement literature, which can be summarised as:

  • Empowerment
  • Inclusivity and Diversity
  • Deliberation and Dialogue
  • Transparency & Accountability
  • Collaboration and Partnership
  • Trust and Respect

2. There were some aspects of good involvement which the People’s Principles didn’t reference that are contained in other frameworks.

The key ‘gaps’ in the People’s Principles were:

  • No explicit identification of potential imbalances in power, and the need for these to be factored into the design of interventions
  • No explicit statement that convenors of involvement need to be held accountable for the decisions that are taken as a result of the process
  • Though inclusivity is referred to, the need to actively address exclusion is not foregrounded
  • The People’s Principles don’t emphasise that participants’ active learning should be ‘designed in’ to involvement processes, although they do emphasize that valuable learning should result from a well-managed process 
  • The People’s Principles also say very little explicitly about the fundamental importance (and challenges) inherent in consensus building 
  • There is no specific mention of the need for monitoring and evaluation

These gaps are understandable given the particular circumstances and focus of the People’s Vision project:

  • It was framed as a high level exploration of the potential benefits of involvement, rather than focusing on contested or challenging areas of activity or hearing from subject specialists who didn’t see benefits in public involvement (hence the relative lack of focus on contestation and consensus building)
  • It was focused on cross cutting and generic characteristics of good practice, rather than delving down into the detail of design (hence, for instance, the lack of focus on the need for evaluation)
  • The other guidelines have been developed through more extensive consultation over longer time framesIt was focused on amplifying the positive potential of public involvement, rather than on anticipating and mitigating the negative consequences of, for instance, new technologies or services (hence, a relative lack of focus on the need for convenors of involvement to be held accountable for acting on the results)

Download the detailed results

You can download the full report with detailed results of this review as either a PDF or word document.