A Study Examining the Usefulness of a New Measure of Research Engagement

Engagement of relevant stakeholders' ideas, opinions, and concerns is critical to the success of modern research projects. We have developed a tool to measure stakeholder engagement, called the Research Engagement Survey Tool (REST). The purpose of this paper is to present the implementation and uptake of the stakeholder engagement measure REST among research teams, including the assessment of barriers and facilitating factors for use of the new research engagement measure in practice.

In this implementation study, project team members participated in baseline and follow-up web-based surveys. Web-based interviews were conducted with a subset of project teams that implemented the REST. On the baseline survey, project teams were asked to provide details about up to three ongoing or recently completed projects, were asked if they agreed with compensation for REST completion, and were asked if they would like to send the survey to stakeholders or would prefer our project team to email their project stakeholders. Follow-up surveys contained questions on reactions to implementing REST and results of REST.

Project team members/researchers who completed the baseline survey (n=86) were mostly female (79%) and Non-Hispanic/Latino(a) White (76%). Those who implemented REST were also mostly female (86%) and Non-Hispanic/Latino(a) White (71%), with an average of 11 years in academic research. About 98% of all participants completing the baseline survey had the capacity to survey partners, while 100% of all teams who implemented REST did. A small portion of respondents indicated the time commitment of REST would be a barrier (29% of baseline survey respondents, 10% of those who implemented REST) and indicated workload would be a barrier (31% of baseline survey respondents, 14% of those who implemented REST).

The data presented here indicate that REST implementation is feasible in a volunteer group of ongoing research projects.