The university’s School of English are recruiting individuals for a ‘Public Involvement Panel’ (PIP) to work with their research team to investigate the effectiveness of Coronavirus Public Health Messaging.

The research project needs volunteers from the general public who represent:

• BAME communities
• residents from England, Scotland and Wales

to get involved in making our research accessible and inclusive for the wider public. You will be reimbursed for your time. We have already had several expressions of interest and are still seeking interest from more people who belong to BAME communities.

The following information is about the PIP, discussing what the research is about and what you can expect from participating.

If you are keen to get involved, please contact researcher Pepita Barnard to find out more.

What is the research about?

The research will investigate how the design of public health messages (relating to coronavirus) can affect
a) people’s understanding of the messages
b) how they respond to it on an individual level and
c) what this understanding and behaviour mean on a population level and whether the messages are effective for promoting public health initiatives in response to Covid-19.

By the end of the project we would like to understand what language people understand and respond to most effectively and ultimately how we can design public health messages for maximum public health benefit.

This project will use publicly available online content and will also recruit people to take part in the study, to use a mobile phone based app to collect data about their interactions with public health messaging.

The design of this research will be led by a team of experts in privacy preserving technologies and linguistics with lots of experience of collecting these kinds of data in an ethical and fair way.

The research team come from a range of disciplines including – English Language, Computer Science and User-Centred Design. The research project was designed in partnership with the University of Cardiff and key national health organisations of Public Health England, Public Health Wales and NHS Education for Scotland.

Information about the PIP

As part of this study we are setting up a Public Involvement Panel (PIP) for this project to act primarily as consultants and reviewers for research study materials, findings and publications. It is really important to this project that we have input from the general public on these activities so that the research can be successful and that research outputs are of value to a wide range of people.

We are recruiting a small group of volunteers (approximately 10-12 people) to represent the range of adult ages and genders for the panel.

We aim for no more than half of the PIP to be comprised of participants who define themselves as White as we are interested in how people with difference cultural backgrounds respond to public health messages.

What are we asking of you?

Once we have found enough members for our PIP, we will circulate information to prepare members for the first of approximately 8 x 2 hour meetings over approximately 18-months.

Early project activities: There will be 3 or 4 online video workshop-meetings that will be scheduled to take place over the next couple of months. These meetings will be used to help shape the documents we will use with the study’s participants.

Later project activities: 3 – 4 meetings will be scheduled towards the end of the project to review our findings, develop public facing communications about the results and to review formal research outputs.

There will reimbursement of £30 for your time to prepare and participate in each of the panel workshops-meetings. There are likely to be a couple of additional remote contacts where the project team ask for your input/ opinion on some small points and the time for this engagement will be reimbursed with a voucher which is appropriate to the task.

What times?

We will plan meeting times to accommodate the preferences of the group. This could include evening meetings. Once group members are identified we will do a short poll to find out some days and times to suit most people.

To be involved in the PIP everyone will have to commit to the first meeting. If you cannot attend a meeting at some point, that is ok, just let us know. Please note that we can only reimburse your time for the PIP meetings that you attend.

How do we meet?

Zoom or Teams will be used for the online PIP meetings. Once we have identified the PIP members we will find out what the majority preference is and decide on the platform based on group preference.

How do I get involved?

If you would like to get involved and/or if you have any questions about the PIP, please contact: pepita.barnard@nottingham.ac.uk