The Relational Health Research Group understands health as an emergent behaviour of the relations within systems and their environments.
Relational Health Group Members
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- Our ethos is to ‘work with’ people rather than ‘do to’ or research ‘on’, recognising the capacities and capabilities which people have.
- To involve people whose lives are affected by the issues as partners throughout the research process.
- To understand the relational nature of the conditions which give rise to the issues as a means of addressing the issues rather than focusing on trying to affect an individual’s behaviours.
- The conditions which support health can only be created when the nature of the barriers to health and wellbeing have been determined from within the system rather than identified externally.
- Understanding the nature of the issues from the people living and working in the neighbourhood, school or workplace allows for new ways of working to respond to th e issues.
- Addressing the social, political and economic conditions which create health inequalities requires transformative ways of working which are in partnership with local communities.
- Our research approaches embrace rather than ignore the complex nature of systems
Principles Underpinning our relational approach to research and collaborative working
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The Relational Health Group works with schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces to create the conditions for health and reduce health inequalities.
We have developed a relational approach to understanding the barriers to health and wellbeing, co-creating ways of addressing these issues as well as evaluating their impact.
What is our relational approach?
- Our ethos is to ‘work with’ people rather than ‘do to’
- People whose lives are affected by the issues are partners throughout the research process, co-designing the questions to be addressed, the research approach, making sense of the findings and co-leading dissemination
- We focus on understanding the relations within the neighbourhood, school or workplace to understand what is causing ill health or generating good health, rather than focussing on the individual or individual behaviours
- We aim to understand the nature of the relations within each setting to identify what people living and working in an area say are the barriers to health and wellbeing
- We use transformative engagement approaches to support the co-creation of local solutions to these issues
- We use evaluative approaches which harness the complexity of the ‘system’ from which the issues arise
Engaged Research Approach
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Our engaged research encompasses the many ways in which researchers and people outside the university meaningfully work together throughout the research process, from understanding the nature of the problems, agreeing the issues that need to be researched and creating the questions together, to delivering and disseminating the research together in such a way that it generates mutually beneficial outcomes.
This approach draws on years of working with Folk.us, a Department of Health funded Research Programme to ensure patients, service users and carers were meaningfully involved in health and social care research across the South West, and the transformative engagement community approach which underpins the Connecting Communities or C2 programme.
