In this issue, Prof Liz Richardson from The University of Manchester tells us about this citizen science project.
What was this project trying to achieve?
This research was commissioned by a local council in Greater Manchester, UK, to help identify possible solutions to inform a local alcohol action plan. The research team were asked to gather insights from a community perspective about why people drink, what drinking patterns are, what the impact of problem drinking is on individuals and communities, and what could be done to reduce problem drinking.
What did the project involve?
We recruited a dedicated research team made up of myself as the academic lead researcher, a research co-lead from a national NGO, local government workers, other paid professionals, and seven citizen scientists who were local residents of a specific geographical area, recruited through open advertisements distributed via local citizen organisations and the local council. The research team were split into pairs to collect qualitative data from target groups of residents in the local area, identified purposively based on local health data and known risk factors. The following data collection methods were used to gather public perceptions on alcohol misuse:
- Vox pop interviews - 74 mini-interviews were carried out at 7 public locations (e.g. a local supermarket, a secondary school, and a local park), asking questions such as ‘What 3 words would you associate with alcohol; and finish this sentence ‘Drinking causes harm because…’). The vox pops interviews were also used to recruit people to take part in longer in-depth interviews.
- Drop box (Post Secret) – 85 anonymous postcards were completed by residents from places in the local area that were harder to collect data door-to-door, such as blocks of flats over 12 storeys. Respondents were asked to detail a secret related to alcohol on their post card and post it in a drop box. This revealed data about people’s personal experiences of alcohol harm.
- Community workshops (focus groups) – Two community workshops were held: one with five younger people and the other with parents of young children; and used visual images to stimulate group discussion on why people drink, the impact of harmful drinking, and ideas on what reduces harmful drinking.
- In-depth interviews – 11 in-depth interviews were conducted to ask members of the public about their drinking patterns and change over time, how they viewed their own drinking compared with others, their experiences of harmful drinking (their own or other peoples’) and what they believe could reduce harmful drinking.
The research team conducted the data analysis and drafted initial findings which were then sense checked via a workshop with 25 practitioners from a wide range of public and community-based services (e.g. specialist alcohol services, family services, front-line neighbourhood services). Local health professionals assessed each of the research findings on salience and current effectiveness of response. The research team then presented a final report to the decision-making policy group of local public sector organisations who had commissioned the research.
Why did the research team choose a citizen science approach?
My motivation as an academic researcher was a chance to integrate community expertise with scientific robustness. Compared to other participatory research methods I have used, citizen science holds firm to rigorous scientific methods at the same time as maximising community input, so it is the best of both worlds.
The citizen scientists were motivated to learn new skills in conducting research, gain research skills accreditation and also share their own direct experiences of harm due to alcohol.
For health and local government members of the research, it was an opportunity to work differently in an area where they and the residents had a complex and sometimes fraught history. They believed that residents in the area would be more likely to trust and open up to other residents.
Overall, for the commissioning organisation, the project was a way to put their policies into practice, acknowledging that service improvement should be informed by different sources of local intelligence about community perceptions and behaviours. Specifically, the commissioning organisation had a good statistical knowledge of the alcohol-related issues affecting the area but felt that there was a need to better understand the issues from local residents’ perspectives and identify approaches that could work locally to change behaviour.
Where is the project up to and what were the key learnings or takeaways?
This project is completed. After the findings were presented, the local government organisation offered some additional resources to develop the findings into a community play with local people as actors. In future projects I would think more about creative ways to disseminate the findings from the start.
At the start of the project, the research team had many concerns about how feasible it was to ask people about the possibly sensitive issue of alcohol harm. By the end, we were very pleased with the quality of qualitative data collected on a sensitive topic. This may have been partly a result of the use of innovative methods like the postcards, voxpops, and visual images in the focus group. All of the data collection instruments were specially designed to be useable by citizen scientists in this project regardless of their levels of formal literacy or previous experience in undertaking research.
The success of this project encouraged the local council and other public sector providers in that district to take citizen science more seriously, and think about more ways to do citizen science.
For more information about this project: