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Engaging rural Australian communities in National Science Week helps increase visibility for women researchers.

ABSTRACT: During a week-long celebration of science, run under the federally supported National Science Week umbrella, the Catch a Rising Star: women in Queensland research (CaRS) programme flew scientists who identify as women to nine regional and remote communities in the Australian State of Queensland. The aim of the project was twofold: first, to bring science to remote and regional communities in a large, economically diverse state; and second, to determine whether media and public engagement provides career advancement opportunities for women scientists. This paper focuses on the latter goal. The data show: (i) a substantial majority (greater than 80%) of researchers thought the training and experience provided by the programme would help develop her career as a research scientist in the future, (ii) the majority (65%) thought the programme would help relate her research to end users, industry partners or stakeholders in the future, and (iii) analytics can help create a compelling narrative around engagement metrics and help to quantify influence. During the week-long project, scientists reached 600 000 impressions on one social media platform (Twitter) using a program hashtag. The breadth and depth of the project outcomes indicate funding bodies and employers could use similar data as an informative source of metrics to support hiring and promotion decisions. Although this project focused on researchers who identify as women, the lessons learned are applicable to researchers representing a diverse range of backgrounds. Future surveys will help determine whether the CaRS programme provided long-term career advantages to participating scientists and communities.

SUBMITTER: Hardy MC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5666252 | biostudies-other | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Engaging rural Australian communities in National Science Week helps increase visibility for women researchers.

Hardy Margaret C MC Desselle Mathilde R MR

Royal Society open science 20171018 10

During a week-long celebration of science, run under the federally supported National Science Week umbrella, the Catch a Rising Star: women in Queensland research (CaRS) programme flew scientists who identify as women to nine regional and remote communities in the Australian State of Queensland. The aim of the project was twofold: first, to bring science to remote and regional communities in a large, economically diverse state; and second, to determine whether media and public engagement provide ...[more]

PMID: 29134069

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Project description:This article examined how researchers participated in research information management systems (RIMSs), their motivations for participation, and their priorities for those motivations. Profile maintenance, question-answering, and endorsement activities were used to define three cumulatively increasing levels of participation: Readers, Record Managers, and Community Members. Junior researchers were more engaged in RIMSs than were senior researchers. Postdocs had significantly higher odds of endorsing other researchers for skills and being categorized as Community Members than did full and associate professors. Assistant professors were significantly more likely to be Record Managers than were members of any other seniority categories. Finally, researchers from the life sciences showed a significantly higher propensity for being Community Members than Readers and Record Managers when compared with researchers from engineering and the physical sciences, respectively.When performing activities, researchers were motivated by the desire to share scholarship, feel competent, experience a sense of enjoyment, improve their status, and build ties with other members of the community. Moreover, when researchers performed activities that directly benefited other members of a RIMS, they assigned higher priorities to intrinsic motivations, such as perceived self-efficacy, enjoyment, and building community ties. Researchers at different stages of their academic careers and disciplines ranked some of the motivations for engaging with RIMSs differently. The general model of research participation in RIMSs; the relationships among RIMS activities; the motivation scales for activities; and the activity, seniority, and discipline-specific priorities for the motivations developed by this study provide the foundation for a framework for researcher participation in RIMSs. This framework can be used by RIMSs and institutional repositories to develop tools and design mechanisms to increase researchers' engagement in RIMSs.

Project description:With the increase in patient and consumer activism through the late twentieth century and into this century, patient roles in research evolved into a new model of research engagement, with patients serving as active advisors and co-leading or leading clinical research. By requiring active engagement of patients and other stakeholders, several government research funders have advanced this model, particularly in Canada, the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), and Australia. A consortium of individuals from these countries formed a Multi-Stakeholder Engagement (MuSE) consortium to examine critical issues in engaged research, establish consensus on definitions, and provide guidance for the field, beginning with an overview of how to involve stakeholders in health research (Concannon et al. J Gen Intern Med. 2019;34(3):458-463) and continuing here with an examination of definitions of research engagement. The political and advocacy roots of engaged research are reflected in definitions. Engagement is conceptualized with reference to research project goals, from informing specific clinical decisions to informing health-system level decisions. Political and cultural differences across countries are evident. Some of these government funders focus on empirical rather than ethical rationales. In countries with centralized health technology assessment, the link between societal values and engaged research is explicit. Ethical rationales for engagement are explicit in most of the published literature on research engagement. Harmonization of definitions is recommended so that research engagement elements, methods, and outcomes and impacts can be clearly examined and understood, and so that the field of research engagement can proceed from a clear conceptual foundation. Specific recommendations for terminology definitions are provided. Placing engaged research on a continuum from specific clinical decisions to more global public and social justice concerns clarifies the type of engaged research, supports appropriate comparisons, and improves the rigor of engaged research methods. The results help identify knowledge gaps in this growing field.

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Engaging rural Australian communities in National Science Week helps increase visibility for women researchers.

Publications

Engaging rural Australian communities in National Science Week helps increase visibility for women researchers.

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