Reflecting on Participatory Approaches at the Great Exhibition Road Festival by

Diversity of audience

2025-06-11 13:29:02 UTC

We got a really diverse and international audience.

2025-06-11 13:29:41 UTC

nice to have a ready made audience who were there to try to things... to level of engagement guarenteed

Direct and face to face interaction

2025-06-11 13:30:26 UTC

Having direct and face to face interaction, I feel we got higher quality of data.

2025-06-11 13:30:44 UTC

We had a citizen science project already developed

having a space where we could have a few activities linked to our research project of which the participatory was one.

Broadening potential participants

2025-06-11 13:31:22 UTC

Being able to attract participants who would not have necessarily been easy to reach without the context of the festival.

The time required for data collection is a stumbling block.

2025-06-11 13:31:26 UTC

With ours being 10-15 minutes, we missed out on a lot of participants who weren't keen on waiting (which is fair)

2025-06-11 13:31:44 UTC

for our project which was around abx access, disposal and use, there is potentially an issue that by virtue of the audience being self-selecting (interested in science) the results may not be widely generalisable to the rest of the population

2025-06-11 13:32:41 UTC

There are more public members who are interested in engaging with science than I thought. We could potentially use this method more widely in other projects.

2025-06-11 13:32:42 UTC

Very diverse range of participants, with positive attitudes towards research

Not a big shift

2025-06-11 13:33:08 UTC

I have had a fair amount of involvement in these kinds of activities in the past and using participatory approaches in my research, so there wasn't any big shift for me. I think it was a more unique experience for the industrial partner working on my project as they would interact with the public, but not whilst trying to collect data.

2025-06-11 13:34:06 UTC

it would be nice to have the opportunity for pre-engagement...e.g. to people who register in advance. This might give us more scope to do/offer other things- what we can do is a bit limited in terms of just "on the day" things

2025-06-11 13:34:09 UTC

Having fun, attention-grabbing activities that draw people

Physical space

2025-06-11 13:34:30 UTC

Our study required fairly specific kit and space in order to run it. Being able to be inside with access to a quiet enclosed room was essential.

To find suitable ways of engagement

2025-06-11 13:35:37 UTC

Perhaps some training about participatory research would be useful.

Crowd management

2025-06-11 13:36:04 UTC

The positive thing is we were never waiting for someone to take part - we were constantly running the study. But there was a wait and we lost perhaps 10% of the people that signed the consent forms who left before taking part.

2025-06-11 13:36:42 UTC

Balancing the need for a big audience with the participatory research taking a long time - teams want a lot of people coming to their activity but the activities naturally have a long dwell time compared to some other non-PR activities

2025-06-11 13:38:46 UTC

Difficult to attract a very specific target audience to an activity e.g. if research needs small audience segment it is difficult to guarantee that audience at the Festival in sufficient numbers

2025-06-11 14:05:59 UTC

Getting enough volunteers when a grant has come to an end

2025-06-11 14:06:01 UTC

getting ethical approval!

Ethics

2025-06-11 14:07:18 UTC

The college process for ethics approval has many issues. It takes too long and is too variable according to who reviews the application. The reviewer did not have any understanding of the festival environment. We had to really spell it out.