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Reflections on setting up a Citizen Panel at UK LLC

Dr Lidis Garbovan

29th Aug 2024

In this blog, Dr Lidis Garbovan shares her experience of setting up the first Citizen Panel at UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC). Lidis talks about her initial six months with UK LLC where she spent time developing the Citizen Panel concept into a fully formed project plan, how she planned her approach to recruit the Steering Group and its first meeting and her personal reflections along the way.
This blog is one of a two-part series, please also read the related blog by Betty Idemudia.

Introduction and background

What would you normally be doing on a Thursday late afternoon, on a hot summer day?
This was the question that nine people, including myself, had to answer on Thursday, 01^st August. I had not anticipated that on such a day I would be conducting an online meeting with a small group of people from different parts of the UK and from diverse walks of life, whose role is to help me co-lead the Citizen Panel project at UK LLC. Most probably on such a nice and warm summer afternoon, after finishing my work, I would have been out in a garden, or a park and had a cold drink with my family or friends, being excited about my upcoming holidays. Neither had I anticipated how my role as a Citizen Panel lead would unfold within 6 months of joining the team at UK LLC, the University of Edinburgh. The role seemed very exciting when I was offered it in late 2023 and so was the team and the location, as I need to travel to Edinburgh on a regular basis from my home in West Midlands.

The idea of a Citizen Panel was pretty much an idea or a set of concepts when it was first presented to me, in my first week at UK LLC, in February 2024. And my role was to translate and develop it into a research project with a life of its own. The project would need to be well planned, organised and academically sound that would deliver a new methodological way of involving diverse publics in addressing the challenges of diversity and inclusion in longitudinal research, and engaging citizens in research governance. The six intense months that I spent on preparing the Citizen Panel project, reading about other examples in the literature, including the conundrum associated with applying for ethical approval at the University of Edinburgh, now feels like a dream.

Co-designing a Steering Group for the Citizen Panel

The Citizen Panel at UK LLC is meant to be co-designed with members of Longitudinal Population Studies and with members of the public, who have not been historically included in longitudinal research. To address these methodological innovations, I decided to first identify and recruit a Steering Group made of six people who would co-lead the Citizen Panel project. The recruitment of the Steering Group members was an interesting process and challenge in itself. Meeting people online to have a chat about their interests and motivations to join the Steering Group was exciting but also a bit anxious for me, as I felt strongly in some of the meetings that many people have much more experience than me with running such projects and despite my varied research experiences with participatory and creative research projects, I felt very new to this kind of work.  I got a sense of relief once the Steering Group members were selected and I was looking forward to our first meeting online, while also discussing with the participants about where and when our in-person meeting could take place in the coming months.

The first Steering Group meeting – being thankful that ‘nobody ran away at the break time’[1].

While struggling for some hours in the evening prior to the meeting with a question I received one day before – ‘what do you expect to get out of the first Steering Group meeting?’, I decided on the day of the meeting that my aims were to have the members meet with each other, get a sense of what their role is, and to build a relationship – as much as this is possible in an online setting.

The meeting started with some technical glitches for some of the participants, whose video and / or audio was not working, and that led to the timetable being pushed behind a little bit. This has helped me learn how to organise the second meeting better and build in more time to check in with everyone at the start. Some participants also had more questions and the conversations were longer than I had anticipated, hence this made me re-think about how to allocate more time for questions and answers in future. Perhaps some of the key lessons for me were about re-thinking how to present complex ideas related to large datasets and longitudinal research in a more friendly format and language and to build a sense of clarity about who, what and why this is about. But I also felt thankful that ‘‘nobody ran away at the break time’ as one of my colleagues said later. This made me reflect that the participants were indeed very interested in the Citizen Panel project and were willing to help me co-lead and co-design it despite the hiccups of a first online meeting.

As a facilitator, I also felt very thankful for the support I received from the key speaker, who took questions and provided answers and summarised some of the discussions for me, when I did not hear or understand the participants very well. And while I felt nervous throughout the meeting, keeping an eye on time constantly, I also tried to keep calm and tell myself that we are doing fine. I felt reassured when I received some feedback afterwards: it was a good meeting, people cared, got involved, talked, and left space for each other to talk and provide brilliant ideas.[2]

To be continued…

I look forward to hearing back from the Steering Group members themselves about their feedback and their expectations for the Citizen Panel. As the project is moving forward, my aim will be to listen and learn from peoples’ experiential perspectives, to report back on the project status, and to continue being open and honest about the challenges of doing a Citizen Panel project aimed at inclusion of seldom heard groups in longitudinal research for the first time. And I am excited about co-writing future blogposts together with the Steering Group members and the Citizen Panel participants themselves, sharing their own views, feelings and perspectives on this project.

Acknowledgements: this work would not have been possible without the immense support, mentoring and help and I received from the UK LLC team members:

• Robin Flaig, Co-Director, and her difficult questions which made me think about what I am doing and why;
• Kirsteen Campbell, Communications and Engagement Officer, who guided me kindly through setting up processes and communicating well;
• Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley, who has been an inspiring academic and sociologist and who kindly met me regularly to overview the project, despite her very busy agenda.
• Julia Moon, Citizen Panel administrator whose brilliant ideas and out-of-the-box questions helped shape the project at every stage;
• Betty Idemudia, Research Assistant who provided incredible support with a concise and relevant literature review in a short time period.
• The University of Bristol team especially Director, Andy Boyd, for our chats at conferences and on the train journey, about the outcomes and papers to consider writing and for which audiences; and to Katharine Evans, Senior Data Manager, for her incredibly supportive role in writing the ethics application, and helping me understand the UK LLC data access process, and the researcher’s journey.

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[1] Quoting Betty, Research Assistant of the Citizen Panel, during the debrief meeting the next day.

[2] Quoting Robin Flaig, Co-Director of UK LLC who was also a part of the meeting and the key speaker.

Dr Lidis Garbovan
Lidis has a background in sociology and social anthropology and prior to joining UK LLC she has worked with several Universities on research projects involving diverse communities in the UK and abroad, for instance exploring the experiences of ethnic minorities and migrants with the Covid-19 pandemic. She has recently contributed to the co-design and delivery of a Citizens’ Jury focused on enhancing the potential of digital health tools and services to help reducing inequalities. Lidis has a strong experience and interest in involving participants in the research and in the co-production of research outcomes, using creative and artistic methods.