The PEOPPLE (Putting Evidence for Older People into Practice in Living Environments) Project: researching the needs of the older community as identified by the older community themselves

Involving people in research that affects them is recognised as good practice, but in most cases involvement is ‘top-down’ through consultations on pre-decided research topics. As such, ‘important’ issues are researcher driven and may not address research areas that would truly impact on people’s lives. We present the PEOPPLE Project; a ‘bottom-up’ approach in which older people lead and shape the research by identifying research questions, and working as part of the research team to answer them. The PEOPPLE (Putting Evidence for Older People into Practice in Living Environments) Project has fostered partnerships with older people in Portsmouth to identify and prioritize research questions tailored to meet their needs as identified by them. We will discuss the PEOPPLE method, which consists of four active phases including: identifying relevant issues; establishing research questions based on these needs; looking at existing evidence to determine practical projects; projects carried out to establish or evaluate local solutions. We hope to show that the PEOPPLE approach is meaningful, and why more research should be carried out this way. We also hope to raise discussion about the benefits and challenges that surround user driven research and how community needs can be responded to by research.