'It Got Me Thinking About My Home Environment but Was Also Great Fun': Using Experiential Methods in Public...

Public involvement in health research is increasingly recognised as essential, yet involving older people, particularly care home residents, remains challenging. Creative and arts-based methods have been proposed as a means of improving accessibility and engagement, but tend to be selected for their perceived general appeal rather than their connection to the research topic. This paper describes an experiential public involvement approach in which activities were deliberately chosen to connect with and embody the sub-topics of the research.

Three workshops were held with a group of older people, including care home residents, to inform a research agenda on indoor air pollution. Each workshop employed a hands-on experiential activity (painting ceramics, attending a glass-blowing demonstration, and building terrariums); all were aligned with the topic of indoor air quality. Workshops were designed to be informal, enjoyable and accessible, deliberately departing from traditional academic formats.

Ten older people participated, including three care home residents. Workshops generated research priorities and identified important outcomes, including quality of life and dizziness, and acceptable interventions relating to indoor air pollution. Feedback indicated high levels of enjoyment, learning and appetite for continued involvement. The experiential approach was well received, fostering relaxed and meaningful discussion, equal participation between care home residents and community-dwelling older adults, and engagement that extended beyond the research itself.

Experiential methods, purposefully aligned with research content, offer a distinctive and effective approach to public involvement with older people, including care home residents. This approach extends existing creative and arts-based methods by embedding a clear conceptual connection to the research topic within activity design, with broader implications for inclusive public involvement practice.

The workshops described in this paper were themselves the public involvement activity. Older people, including care home residents, actively shaped the research agenda on indoor air pollution by identifying priority outcomes and acceptable interventions. As this was an initial exploration into a new topic area, the research team had no established public contributor contacts with relevant lived experience of or interest in indoor air pollution to involve in co-designing the workshops. The workshops themselves were therefore the first step in building those relationships, with the intention that members of the group will be involved as genuine partners in any future research. Public contributors have been kept informed of the progress of this work throughout, including during preparation of this manuscript, and it is intended that members of the group will be involved in the development of future funding proposals as co-applicants.