Participants
Eligible participants will be researchers who have funding for AGE-WELL’s Core Research Program 2020 (CRP).
Recruitment
We will recruit participants by sending an email to the 24 CRP researchers. It will describe the aims of the project, include a guide to creating a good lay summary of research projects, and provide contact information for the principal investigator of the project.
Co-creating lay summaries of research project with stakeholders: protocol
Figure 1 illustrates the protocol for co-creating project lay summaries with stakeholders: investigate principles of writing a good lay summary, identify the target readership, identify key stakeholders, recruit them, prepare for co-creating lay summary workshops, and execute the workshops. We will guide participants in navigating the lay-summary co-creating process via one-on-one consultations. In particular, once participants have identified the target readership for their respective lay summaries, we will host, and facilitate if needed, workshops with them and their identified stakeholders to enable the co-production of lay summaries of their CRP project.
Investigate principles of writing a good lay summary
We will provide a guide to developing a good lay summary of research (Additional file 1) to 24 participants once they have agreed to be involved in this project. The guide comprises four sections (Fig. 2). Drawing from the literature on and available guidelines for developing a lay summary, we include a definition of a lay summary and explain why it is important to create one. We also emphasize that identifying the target readership is a critical step as it informs participants about what information needs to be included in a lay summary and what language, or literacy, level the lay summary needs to be written in. Additionally, the guide explains the basic principles of writing a good lay summary, with a particular focus on precision and succinctness and the use of plain language. The guide also contains five questions that should be answered in a lay summary—1) What problem needs to be addressed? 2) What are the aims of the project? 3) How will the project be carried out? 4) Why is the project important? and 5) What are the expected outcomes or impacts of the project?—and includes examples of the responses to these questions.
Identify the target readership
Participants will identify the target readership for their lay summaries. While a lay summary is generally targeted at the general public, it is also broad in scope [6]. Defining the readership at the outset is critical to the development of an accessible and compelling lay summary because it determines the level of interest in an issue that a project seeks to address, the knowledge level about the issue, the language, or literacy, levels of the target readership, and the ultimate format of the lay summary [3, 11, 25]. For example, guidelines for target reading levels in lay summaries vary from Grade 6 to Grade 10 reading levels [4, 11, 26]. However, while a Grade 8 reading level is standard for newspapers and is thus often seen as offering a general assessment of reading levels among the general public [11], Nunn and Pinfield [5] note that reading levels vary among readerships and that readers with a high literacy level tend to be the group that benefits most from a lay summary. This means that a large segment of the general public will potentially not be in a position to benefit from a lay summary. To minimize this risk, it is therefore important to think carefully about who the target readership is, whose perspectives need to be integrated into a lay summary (e.g., older adults, caregivers, funders, researchers), and why the lay summary is being created (e.g., to recruit participants in a project, to increase awareness of an issue to be resolved in a group of people who experience the issue).
Identify stakeholders to collaborate with
Keeping in mind the target readership identified, participants will then decide which stakeholders to collaborate with to create their project lay summaries. Essentially, some stakeholders involved in the co-creation process should represent the target readership of the lay summary, because they are the most likely group to provide pertinent insight and perspectives. It is therefore important to have a clear understanding of what type of perspectives and expertise will be of most value to a lay summary in terms of its meeting the needs of the identified target readership. Furthermore, taking into account who will benefit from being directly involved in the process (e.g., empowerment, awareness of the project and its aims), and how they will benefit (e.g., increased knowledge about potential solutions), might help participants identify which stakeholders to work with. Ideally, participants and key stakeholders should collaborate at every stage of developing the lay summary to optimize participants’ opportunities to spontaneously learn, discuss, negotiate, and integrate different perspectives. This level of collaboration facilitates an iterative and more organic co-creation process, and thus the resulting lay summary is more likely to be fit for purpose and mutually agreeable.
Recruit identified stakeholders to work on a lay summary
Once participants have identified who to collaborate with in co-creating a lay summary, they start the recruitment process. This step can be a challenge, as lay-summary co-creation requires particular time commitment from stakeholders. Participants must ensure the identified stakeholders will be available to attend any face-to-face co-creation sessions, but family caregivers, for example, may have difficulty attending sessions during the day unless they can find someone to replace them at home. Participants must therefore be prepared to be flexible in terms of the formats and timings for meetings for the co-creation process.
Participants must give careful consideration to the optimum number of stakeholders to recruit for the co-creation process. A group of 6–10 with relatively diverse backgrounds may introduce different ideas and perspectives but reaching a consensus could prove challenging. In contrast, a group of 2–4 may result in more focused discussion and streamline the co-writing, co-revising, and co-editing process, but the scope of diversity is necessarily more restricted.
Recruitment methods will vary. A multi-methods approach can be effective as it addresses people’s different preferences for and accessibility to various communication methods (e.g., flyers, emails, social media platforms). Approaching community organizations and groups to which target stakeholders are likely to belong and asking them to circulate recruitment notices to their members (e.g., seniors’ centre, patient groups, family caregiver associations) would increase the number of target stakeholders that participants can reach out to. Regardless of which medium is used, all the objectives and expectations of the project need to be clearly and concisely expressed. For instance, participants may state the overall objective of the co-creation process: “To write, in simple language, a summary of a project that investigates how family caregivers manage giving medication to older adults living with dementia.” If the process extends over multiple sessions, the objective of each session may be described: “The first session focuses on developing a shared understanding of the project” and “the second session focuses on discussing a drafted lay summary and finalizing it.”
Prepare workshop sessions
Participants will prepare for their lay-summary co-creation workshops by making decisions about the number of co-creation workshop sessions they plan to have, and the objectives of each session. The number of sessions that will be needed to complete a lay summary should be calculated based on the availability, skills, and experiences of the participating stakeholders. For example, if a wide range of stakeholders are invited, and includes stakeholders who do not consider themselves to be writers in any way, the writing process may take longer.
Participants will identify and explain the objectives of each session to stakeholders prior to the workshop. For example: “The first session aims to develop a shared understanding of a project, and the second session will focus on writing, revising, and/or editing a lay summary.” For each session, participants will plan what instructions and guidance they will give to stakeholders before they come to sessions so that both groups can make best use of their time. For example, participants will consider 1) sharing an academic research proposal or the original summary prior to the first session with the stakeholders, and 2) developing and sharing glossaries of key terms used in the original research proposal and summary. It is also important to inform stakeholders what they are expected to do prior to the sessions (e.g., read the original summary, identify language they do not understand, and be ready to discuss the summary in a session) as well as during the sessions.
Execute workshop sessions
A participant may start a session by welcoming stakeholders, setting ground rules and expectations for the session (e.g., respect for different perspectives and ideas), and briefly explaining the objectives of the co-creation process as well as of each session (if there will be more than one session). The participant may then present an overview of their project to the stakeholders, followed by a Q & A about it. During the Q & A phase, stakeholders may request further clarification of key concepts of a project, which may lead to discussion about potential simple terms to describe them. After the Q & A, a participant may introduce and discuss the structure of a lay summary (e.g., problems/challenges, objectives, methods, and impacts). Key ideas about each section of a lay summary will be discussed. Small group activities may be a more effective approach for identifying key ideas to be included in a lay summary if stakeholders are introverted or otherwise hesitant to offer an opinion. A participant may end the session by sharing experiences of the co-creation process among the stakeholders. Throughout the session, a participant may have a facilitator present to help not only with time management but also with discussing and developing ideas put forward by stakeholders and a participant. Figure 3 presents an example of a first session.
Writing a lay summary based on the identified key ideas may be done in a subsequent session. Alternatively, at the end of the first session, the participant might invite stakeholders to draft a lay summary outside the scheduled sessions, although this is dependent on stakeholders’ motivation, availability, and skills.
Ethical procedures
Ethical approval is not required for this project because its objective is to improve the quality of services and resources for promoting and supporting collaborative team research for researchers within the AGE-WELL network. According to Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, quality assurance and quality improvement studies do not constitute research and thus do not require a Research Ethics Board review [27].