Much in the way I tend to do a lot of things, I have been discussing the ups and downs of creating and presenting my PICE poster without giving any context to what PICE is. Much in keeping with Baron-Cohen's Theory of Mind*, I tend to assume once I know something that, the rest of the world will now know it too and forget that life doesn't work like that. Instead, it is usually far more the case of what I tell my kids, which is that "none of us is born with knowledge", only having the ability to breathe, eat and poop** at birth, whilst pretty much everything else we ever have to do or know has to be learned in one way or another. Because of the backwards way of thinking often talk like Yoda, I do, but I digress, and although I do not necessarily agree with a lot of Baron-Cohen's assumptions surrounding the autistic brain, Theory of Mind may well have some part to play in the reason I am explaining PICE at this point in my blog posts rather than when you probably needed to know for context.
So, let's start by explaining what PICE actually stands for. As you may have figured out already, PICE is an acronym, and like any self-respecting profession, we researchers do love a good acronym. So PICE is short for "Public Involvement and Community Engagement", and at its most basic level, it means that we involve the community in our research. What's new about that, I hear you say? Surely that's what psychology has done for years when recruiting participants from specific groups of individuals when conducting research. But PICE is more. Yes, we will be recruiting participants as part of any study we design, but that simply passively engages the public; what PICE aspires to do is actively engage the public in the entire research process. Now, this idea isn't new; health and social care research has been using this idea in research for quite some time. But oddly, although the cross-overs between psychology and health and social care are numerous, psychology research is rather late to the party. So what is it about PICE research that makes it so different? And the clue is in the "I"; it is involvement, and that involvement can be as little as a Focus Group designed to help inform the direction of research right up to members of the community working as researchers themselves, doing anything from gathering data, through to data analysis and even the interpretation of results, with the public often being at the core in feeding back the findings to their community and peers. A PICE study may involve the community in all or part of the research process, and the level of involvement is as much guided by the public collaborators themselves as is feasibly possible.
So, if how my poster was received is anything to go by, this approach seems tricky for academic psychologists to get their head around, and with that in mind, what does this mean for my research? If I am using a PICE approach, where do I start? Well, thankfully, I have been given a supervisor who is there to help guide me through my placement, and when it comes to PICE, this isn't his first rodeo. And as it would happen, he has also kindly invited me along to a couple of seminars in which he was speaking, which were organised by another healthy acronym, NIHR ARC - aka the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration - North East, and when it comes to Public Involvement and Community Engagement, these guys know their involvement from their collaboration. I have been to two of these seminars so far, and they are brimming with people keen to make a difference but who also acknowledge that academic research alone does not hold all the answers. The attendees are diverse and range from professors who work for the most prestigious of institutions to professionals that work in the community to community members themselves who have become active researchers as a direct result of being invited to be involved in PICE studies. And it was at such a seminar that I was introduced to a set of newly released guidelines designed to help researchers like me with the best practices when collaborating with the public in PICE research.
The guidelines are outlined in the Community Engagement Tool kit (if you're interested in reading these in detail, click here), and this toolkit is a great place for me to start. It outlines the importance of knowledge and the expertise of the community in understanding the issues that affect them and the importance of being flexible, building lasting relationships, and giving something back, which many of the researchers who have spoken at the NIHR ARC seminars have spoken about at great lengths. It often seems, as researchers, we believe that by conducting research, we are giving something to society just by its very nature, but there remains a certain degree of arrogance surrounding the assumption that we know best what that research should be. All too often, it is based on gaps in previous research and limitations of prior studies, which little to no consideration given to whether that research would actually add anything to society or benefit the very people our altruistic natures hope to help. PICE sees the public as collaborators, not simply participants, and as such, the relationship between academic researchers and those individuals that collaborate with us from the general public should be reciprocal; this reciprocity should not just be about how much time we give each other but also be about the exchange of knowledge, after all, we are seeking their expertise, it seems only fitting that we should share ours with them, treating our community collaborators as colleagues who have skills and knowledge that as psychology researchers we may lack, not participants to whom we simply bleed for knowledge then give a simple "thank you" and walk away. If a member of the public educates me in areas I am unfamiliar with and gives up their time to assist me, it seems only fair that I give something back. I think that's what I like most about PICE because the academic snobbery that often surrounds assumptions of what the public is capable of has always been a huge bug bare of mine; the general public is a lot more talented and capable than the intellectual elite may actually like to think, this I know as not so long ago I was one (member of the general public, not intellectual elite. haha).
Yet, all this collaboration does leave us with a problem as psychology researchers. Regarding the systems surrounding the funding of research, this also lags somewhat behind compared to its health and social care counterparts. When applying for funding in psychology-based research, you must outline exactly what your proposed study will entail. When using PICE as a structure, you really don't know what that is. For a discipline that has built itself upon the premise that its focus is on finding out things that are not yet known, the funding bodies seem oddly obsessed with knowing what exactly that unknown will be. But that is a quandary for another time. Right now, I'll settle on having at least a general idea of what PICE research entails and accept that my knowledge will grow from here. The more I listen and collaborate with others, the more my understanding of PICE and how best to apply it in my research practices will grow, and that, after all, is what PICE is about.
* Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?. Cognition, 21(1), 37-46.
** Although I must confess that I tend not to use the word poop, I have a love and fascination for a more expressive vocabulary.
All images except Brucey, taken from the NIHR Community Engagement Toolkit, see link above. were
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