"Challenging But Worth it!": The Purpose of Participatory Research in Urban Health, an Evaluation and Derived Framework

Abstract

Participatory approaches are becoming paramount to harness the relationship between researchers, government, industry, and civil society to inform programs and policies. This study aimed to characterize participatory methodologies used in urban health research and propose a framework for reporting urban health participatory projects. Following a convergent mixed-methods approach, this study evaluated 20 pilot studies from the Urban Health Cluster funded under the Horizon 2020 European Commission Programme. Project leads completed an online survey and  participated in semi-structured interviews. The integrated analysis of the findings informed the development of a framework for the systematic evaluation of participatory urban health studies. This evaluation revealed trends in urban health projects outlining participatory methods’ purpose, involved stakeholders, mechanisms for participation, expected outcomes, challenges, and evaluation strategies. The characterization revealed four potential purposes for including participatory methods: To assess correlations; to raise awareness; to co-create interventions; and to assess health-related effects. Public authorities (90%) and civil society (85%) are the stakeholders most frequently engaged. The results suggest the lack of a theory of change informing the potential participatory-led urban health transformation. The proposed model promotes using a theory of change enhance the reproducible conceptualization, deployment, and evaluation of participatory methods to influence urban health outcomes.

Note:
Funding declaration: The European Urban Health Cluster is funded by the European Commission. This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (grant No. 945307 (eMOTIONAL cities), No. 945238 (ENLIGHTENme), No. 945105 (HEART), No. 945095 (RECETAS), No. 945391 (URBANOME), No. 945097 (WELLBASED)) and the P1-0143 programme “Cycling of substances in the environment, mass balances, modelling of environmental processes and risk assessment”, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.

Conflict of Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Keywords: public engagement, Environmental health, Evaluation, Citizen Science, review, model.