Peer research when planned and delivered thoughtfully with training and support offered to peer researchers can be an empowering experience leading to positive change. 

This guide is designed to help you get started in peer research, though much of this content is also applicable to patient and public involvement and engagement work. 

I use these questions to guide my work and encourage feedback to help me to improve this resource.

(Remember you may refine your research question after you spend some time with peer researchers and experts through experience, even better they may be setting the agenda so you could use this space to think about how you will support people to find out what they want to explore!)

Is peer research the right approach for this project?

What time commitment are you asking them for?

Where will you meet, and how often?

Will you work as a group and explore your group values? This can be a nice way of starting to work up some ideas for how you will work together.

How can peer research redress a power imbalance?

What thoughts do you have about how decisions will be made, about who decides?

Who can help you?

What resources can you use?

What ethical, legal or data protections considerations are needed? You might like to do some reading of other researcher's ethics statements or policies as a guide.

If you are working independently will you put your own ethical review process in place? Will you build in any risk assessment?

Whilst surveys and interviews can be effective methods for peer research projects there is a world of creative and artistic approaches at your fingertips, spend some time reading about creative research methods, think about the skills and interests peer researchers bring, is there a way to bring these skills and assets out through creative practice?

How can a peer research approach help?

How will data come in centrally as fieldwork gets underway? Will you need to put in place any data sharing protocols?

Will peer researchers need to have access to lockable storage or password protected area?

What training can you offer?

Can you bring more of that micro-project thinking to this and start with a small experiment to analyse a chunk of data together?

Think about how groups meet, will people be able to dip in and out of the project?

How will you make decisions and reach agreement about the best way forward?

I have learned to ask for what I know will result in a good project, this has included providing food for peer researchers as we can’t work on empty stomachs, vouchers for participants, paying peer researchers for their time.

Think about what you need to do this well, and build in some contingency!

This might look like coming together to talk about what was interesting or surprising, or whether anything came up that may have influenced the responses that people gave.

People working in this field often talk about mis-steps, things that happen in the real world that we might not be prepared for, can you create a space to reflect on these and explore if there are things you might do differently in future?

People have lives outside of the project and timescales and budgets may need to be flexible

As well as thinking about the planned outcomes for the research what about the potential outcomes for peer researchers? Will you measure these?

It can be nice to come together at the end to reflect together, to share openly the successes and mis-steps and challenges and look back at how you worked together.

Might the group want to continue to meet, even socially? Plan in time to explore these things together

How will you keep in contact with people so that they don’t think the project has come to an abrupt end or feel disconnected?

Think about times when you have handled this kind of thing, what have you done? What have others done?

What has gone well or is there anything you would do differently?

Perhaps use these as journaling prompts and find a space to reflect on the things that come up for you.

You might like to work through some of these questions as a research group, to help offer a gentle steer as you develop a project together.

I have encouraged myself and peer researchers and people connected to the research to trust the process, whilst also myself feeling on a journey without a map!

This resource attempts to surface some of the challenges and offer a starting point as you go on your journey!

If you'd like to share thoughts with me you can email me Ange.Broadbridge@gmail.com and I will try to answer questions you might have