Research and innovation must become open and responsible towards society in order to contribute to a healthy, sustainable, and just society. This means, involving the voices, perspectives, values and concerns of citizens and societal stakeholders as an intrinsic part of research methodologies. JoinUs4Health has taken up this challenge for a research area of decisive importance for society, namely cohort research: the longitudinal assessment of factors that determine the health of citizens. JoinUs4Health aims to combine Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and crowdsourcing as converging approaches to promote inclusive innovation and citizen engagement using three cohort institutions as living laboratories. Our ambition is to engage cohort participants, citizens and other groups of societal actors (i.e. policy makers, business/industry, non-governmental organisations, education community) in a co-creative manner, so as to make cohort research more sensitive to societal expectations and concerns and to promote access to science, especially in the field of health and life sciences.
Six institutional changes are being implemented at three institutions in Germany (Study of Health in Pomerania since 1997), the Netherlands (Rotterdam Study since 1989) and Poland (Bialystok Plus since 2019). We hypothesize that the proposed approach can increase citizens’ science skills, as well as their understanding of, interest in and trust in science, thus being able to break the glass wall between the general public and scientists, and to increase society’s readiness to see science as an investment in the future.
The project objectives were to
1. ESTABLISH and REVIEW a conceptual framework
2. DEVELOP, TEST and APPLY technology to facilitate engaging various actors as part of cohort research
3. EXPLORE, IMPLEMENT and MONITOR institutional changes and incorporate RRI into the governance framework of three institutions conducting cohort studies
4. ADVANCE RRI and citizen science into the mainstream of public engagement, science communication and education
5. PROMOTE engagement and COMMUNICATE and DISSEMINATE outputs via traditional and innovative means
The geographical link to the cohort regions and semi-open access to in-depth cohort data provides tremendous potential to combine local scientific and societal knowledge to work on integrated health approaches tailored to local settings. Currently, it is still too early to see a measurable impact, e.g. in terms of a more scientifically interested and literate society. The institutional changes are however showing first effects and will be sustained beyond the project period. The final evaluation report (Deliverable 7.3) provides an overview of the project's initial assumptions, its context and the results from the application of two evaluation frameworks, the NEOH evaluation framework (
https://neoh.onehealthglobal.net/(opens in new window)) and the MICS evaluation tool (
https://mics.tools/projects/joinus4health(opens in new window)).
