Community-Engaged Dissertation Research: A Student Reflection

Emma Green is a final year undergraduate studying BSc Sustainability and Environmental Management (Industrial), who collaborated with the Positive Impact Partners (PIP) programme to conduct community-engaged research for her dissertation. In this blog post she shares her insights into this process, reflecting on what she gained from the experience including both the benefits and challenges. 

When faced with writing a 12,000 word dissertation, I couldn’t accept that I could potentially be channelling so much time and effort into a piece of research, only for it to sit on my laptop! So instead, I chose to explore the opportunity of using my dissertation to create real-world impact through engaging with my local community. With combined help from both my dissertation supervisor and the Positive Impact Partners (PIP) programme, I established how to meet the requirements of my undergraduate dissertation, while benefitting the local community I’ve been a part of for the last 4 years. 

 

What process did you follow? 

Following initial conversations with my dissertation supervisor and realising I wanted to work with the local community, I reached out to the PIP programme to get advice on how to approach community-engaged research. Having completed my ethics approval and risk assessment based on a broad ‘community-engaged’ approach, I reached out to 15 different community groups based around LS6 to introduce myself as a researcher, the aspirations of my project, and whether co-creating research is something the group would be interested in. Subsequent conversations were had with 6 groups to establish their research interests, and through comparing these with my skills and interests as a researcher and evaluating the time available, the decision was made to work with the Community Streets Initiative who aim to create more sustainable communities in LS6 by focusing on street-level, practical solutions and community events. Having attended events and meetings to build relationships with the key community partners, I worked with the group to identify potential research questions that would benefit their work as well as fill a gap in the literature. Having co-created the research aim and questions, I then updated my ethics and risk assessment and went away to conduct the research, informing the group of any changes, before presenting the findings back to Community Streets once complete. 

What did your research cover? 

Having reviewed the current literature on creating sustainable communities in university neighbourhoods, it was clear that studentification presented a major barrier, with solutions narrowly focusing on redistributing students away from residential areas and into purpose built student accommodation. In addition to this, the literature on studentification, and specifically on how to improve the impacts of studentification, lacked student perspectives. This fed directly into the operations of Community Streets, who were struggling to engage students with the initiative but appreciated how integral to their work students were. My research therefore aimed to uncover viable strategies to encourage student participation towards creating sustainable communities in Leeds. Working with student households from Woodhouse, I first aimed to establish student perspectives of studentification and what the barrier were that prevented students contributing towards a sustainable community. These findings could then inform the development of solutions for how to overcome such barriers to encourage students to participate in a sustainable community. The findings identified three key strategies to encourage student participation in a more sustainable community: addressing landlordism and poor quality student housing, working with preestablished dynamics of the student community, and overcoming the evident dichotomy between students and permanent residents. 

 

Emma's research has provided us with some surprising and invaluable insights on living within the local community from a student perspective. Her research has imbued us with a better understanding of our local student community and will assist us in shaping the Community Streets project next year.

- Beth Bingley, Community Streets coordinator

 

What are your main reflections? 

For me, conducting community-engaged research for my dissertation made my research feel much more impactful, which really helped my motivation for conducting high-quality research – regardless of my final grade, my research had a purpose and could actually be useful to people in my local area. From my experience, my research participants similarly seemed more engaged with the research and honest in their responses due to the community-based nature of my project, knowing that their insights were going towards creating real-world change as opposed to simply just contributing to a mandatory university research project. While following this process did require additional time and effort with additional complexity to conduct within the usual UG dissertation timeframe, this meant I was able to develop skills that will be widely transferable in the future and that were really useful examples to draw upon in graduate job interviews. Working with community partners did require additional patience, respect and flexibility, but also provided useful guidance to choosing a research area that would be impactful and insightful. If you’re considering conducting community-engaged research, the main consideration in my opinion is the need to be proactive, ensuring you stick to your required deadlines, while providing the community partners with enough time to be properly involved, starting earlier rather than later certainly helps! Otherwise, I think it has been a really rewarding experience and certainly added a lot of value to my time completing my dissertation. 

 

If you’re interested in conducting community-engaged research for your dissertation, get in touch with the Positive Impact Partners programme team by emailing [email protected] with the subject line ‘PIP community-engaged research’. We can connect you to people in the local area who can help you shape your research ideas, and benefit from your findings so your research can have a real-world impact.  

 

If you’re interested in getting involved with the Community Streets initiative, visit their website to find out more about their upcoming activities in your area.  

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We use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to guide our activity. Emma's work on her dissertation is linked to the following SDGs: 

• Goal 4: Quality Education
• Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Goal 17: Partnership for the Goals

Find out more about our impact on the SDGs.