Increasing Participation Among Seniors in Health Intervention Research

Participation, co-design and engagement are buzz-words in today’s health research, especially in health interventions. Public engagement in health intervention research creates legitimacy and often private foundations reward it.

However, participation, especially among senior citizens, is not always easy to facilitate and can in some cases end up quite low on the classic ladder of participation. Public participation in research furthermore challenges classic research designs and poses ethical questions in terms of why we are inviting people to participate. What kind of knowledge do we want to generate from it? And what can the participants gain from it?

In this session, Dr. Sandholdt will present some examples from her research group’s work with participatory methods for a project which investigates health, well-being and social relations among seniors in a disadvantaged social housing area undergoing physical restructuring in Denmark. She will discuss the findings in terms of the benefits and challenges the research group has encountered.

Catharina Thiel Sandholdt, PhD has an interdisciplinary background with a BA in humanities, MA in health sociology and a PhD in science education and co-design. She has a passion for building bridges between research and practice and explores participatory design methods in health research and health interventions. Currently Dr. Sandholdt works as a post doc in the Department for Public Health at the University of Copenhagen where she focuses on developing and analyzing participatory methods for community health interventions, with a special focus on visual methods.

Co-hosted by the Center for Systems and Community Design and the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center, the Systems Change Series is a monthly lecture and workshop series hosted by the Center that creates space for distinguished scholars, practitioners and entrepreneurs across a broad range of sectors to share the ways in which they work at the forefront of incorporating systems and design thinking into their respective practices.