Circling your Research Design project

Within the ‘Circling your Research Design’ project, we are exploring a new approach to the development of research proposals. The central element of this approach is the ‘Circling your Research’ methodology, which helps participants to develop a solid plan for their research, based on eight distinct perspectives. One characteristic feature of this method of working is that all relevant participants contribute equally to the selection of the case study. We will be testing the new ‘Circling your Research Design’ approach within seven newly formed alliances. These alliances have been awarded funding by the ZonMw Long-Term Care Commission to write a research proposal and the associated grant application. We will be supporting them in this undertaking, as well as examining which impact our approach has on the proposal under development and the newly formed alliance in question.

Within this study, we will be pursuing four key goals:

Knowledge goal

The research is intended to increase our knowledge of the contribution made by the ‘Circling your Research’ approach to the development of alliances for the submission and implementation of research proposals within ZonMw’s Long-Term Care and Support (LZO) Programme and the Simply Special (GB) Programme. In this context, we will be focussing on three levels of collaboration:

Substance
Process
Relationships

Change goal

Our research aims to help realize change in the newly formed alliances, but we also want to contribute to a different way of working within ZonMw.

Professionalisation goal

The research is intended to help a number of different target groups increase and strengthen their knowledge and skills:

Help the members of the newly established alliances to set up these partnerships and develop suitable research designs;
Help ZonMw’s staff members and commission members to effectively support the formation of consortia and the development of suitable research designs, as well as assess more effectively to which extent a research proposal is suitable.

Design goal

The research is intended to yield the design the following products:

A process consisting of four workshops alternated by individual activities, in which potential consortium members will be working together on the joint development of a research design;
Resources that can be used during this process to ‘circle the research’
Guidelines that can be used by researchers, commission members and ZonMw staff members to develop a suitable research design for practice-based research. These guidelines will subsequently be published as open access information.

The project will yield the following end products (which will be published as open access information):

• A number of fully realised workshops alternated by individual activities, in which potential consortium members will be working together on the joint development of a research design;

• Resources that can be used during this process to ‘circle the research’;

• Guidelines that can be used by researchers, commission members and ZonMw staff members to develop a suitable research design for practice-based research. These guidelines will constitute an updated version of (Andriessen & Ganzevles, 2019);

• A final report that presents the results of the conducted interviews, after a term of 18 months.

18 January 2021 - 31 December 2023

We will be testing our ‘Circling your Research’ approach to the development of a research design (Andriessen & Ganzevles, n.d.) within seven newly developed alliances. In each alliance, we will support and facilitate a series of meetings during which the consortium partners discuss the various perspectives and jointly decide on the concrete design of their research. At the same time, we will be evaluating the various steps that we take and possible interventions that we make in this context.