Research Ready Communities Brighton & Hove

Residents leading research

Local people are the experts in their own lives and communities. When they lead research, it's grounded in their experience and relevant to their needs.

In collaboration with local voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, the Sussex Research Engagement Network (REN) aims to increase diversity, inclusion, and participation in health and care research.

As a partnership, we support residents to:

• get involved in research
• ask the right questions
• gather the answers that matter to them

There's now a network of local community researchers who have gained the skills and confidence to run their own projects and reach out to others in their area who are often overlooked.

Gaining deeper insights from resident research

With the help of our local partners, Trust for Developing Communities and The Hangleton and Knoll Project, the Public Health Intelligence Team delivered workshops to gain a better understanding of what communities need to design and carry out local research.

Over two workshops, 13 community researchers across the city designed insightful research questions from the Health Counts 2024 survey, identifying key topics relevant to their communities.

As a group, they also explored:

• methods of presenting findings
• delivering group presentations
• collaboratively deciding on strategies for sharing the results

Research questions and results

The two groups of community researchers developed the following primary research questions about data within the Health Counts survey:

• How does community cohesion relate to the mental health of residents in the East and Central areas of Brighton & Hove?
• How does social connectivity relate to emotional well-being in Brighton & Hove residents, specifically in the West of Brighton & Hove?

The results for the research questions showed that in both the West and the East and Central areas of Brighton & Hove, stronger community cohesion is shown to be associated with higher happiness. The results also identified groups with higher or lower community cohesion and happiness scores.

Further steps identified to develop this work included:

• sharing insights with their communities and the Health Forums
• informing commissioning decisions
• supporting future community research funding bids

After the workshops, community researchers reported a large increase in confidence and understanding of how to develop a research question, how to analyse data and different ways to present findings.

Nearly all the community researchers intended to apply what they learnt to future research projects.