Practicing Effective Stakeholder Engagement for Impactful Research

Scholars acknowledge that achieving societal impact should be a key aim of research. However, societal impact usually becomes tangible only long after research completion, so that scholars can hardly report its evidence in a research article, if it is to be published in a timely manner. Interventionist research methods that involve engagement with stakeholders to generate solutions for real-world problem situations can provide a path towards direct societal impact. We argue that achieving such impact requires effective engagement with careful attention to the timing of engagement and inclusiveness of stakeholders – drawing on examples from our own research projects. Our analyses suggest that the research team needs to make choices to structure engagement efforts across research phases spanning problem definition, solution design, and solution evaluation. These choices define a space of possibilities that a research team can navigate based on considerations of access, research setting, research approach, and researcher expertise. We map these to three specific interventionist research approaches: Action Research, Clinical Research, and Action Design Research to highlight the alternatives. The paper concludes by pointing out that interventionist approaches can create favorable conditions but require the judicious exercise of choices by the research team to generate outcomes with direct societal impact.