Methodological Reflection on an Initiated Expert Stakeholder Engagement Process. A Case Study of a Dementia Prediction Discourse

Abstract

Abstract BackgroundEngagement and participation are vital for including experiences, opinions, or expertise regarding the need for action and specifying goals of relevant stakeholders. In recent years, engagement processes have significantly gained in prominence especially in the field of healthcare; and participation has been actively demanded by public health agencies as well as by health research funding organizations. Despite numerous international work and wide agreement on the benefits of stakeholder engagement, there is still limited published empirical evidence on methodological best practices for stakeholder approaches and even less on evaluation or outcomes in the process of developing policy.MethodsOn the basis of previous research on stakeholder discourses and with the German case study at hand, I inferred normative criteria for the evaluation of discourse processes. For the methodological examination, my manuscript presents a comprehensive framework of normative criteria relevant to stakeholder engagement planning, implementation, evaluation and reporting, and to illustrate different evaluation and reporting needs for research on stakeholder engagement, namely, depth of participation, legitimate selection of stakeholders, representativeness, process management, output, role definition, and transparency. ResultsThe developed normative evaluation criteria make the evaluation of an engagement process with a large amount of material possible. My analysis indicates the key facilitating elements and also barriers of this participatory approach, demonstrating the importance of especially deploying the following evaluation criteria: output, representativeness, process management, and transparency.ConclusionThe seven developed evaluation criteria have been effective for the evaluation of the stakeholder discourse on dementia prediction. These evaluation criteria may also be conducive to the evaluation of engagement processes on other health research topics with a large corpus of material. To date and to my knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation framework for engagement processes with experts in the field of assessing biomedical issues is missing in the literature and my work aims at bridging this gap.