Citizen-driven participatory research conducted through knowledge intermediary units. A thematic synthesis of the literature on “Science Shops”

Abstract

A Science Shop acts as a mission-oriented intermediary unit between the scientific sphere and civil society organizations. It seeks to facilitate citizen-driven open science projects that respond to the needs of civil society organizations and which, typically, include students in the work process. We performed a thematic analysis of a systematically selected literature on Science Shops to understand how the scientific literature reflects the historical evolution of Science Shops in different settings and what factors the literature associates with the rise and fall of the Science Shop. We used the PRISMA methodology to search for scientific papers in indexed journals in eight databases published in English, French and Spanish, and employed the thematic theory approach to extract and systematize our results. Twenty-six scientific articles met the inclusion criteria. We identified three meta-categories and ten sub-topics which can serve as key pointers to guide the set-up and future work of Science Shops. Our results identify a major paradox: Science Shops incorporate public values in their scientific agendas but have difficulties sustaining themselves institutionally as they do not fit the current dominant research paradigm. Science shops represent a persuasive complementary approach to the way science is defined, executed and produced today.

Our Health: exploring interdisciplinarity and community-based participatory research in a higher education science shop

“…Similarly to the experiences of other science shops (Gresle et al, 2021), sustainability of OH has been a challenge. The IRC funding model is finite, limiting OH's capacity and expansion, and it is not sustainable long term.…”

“…While these and other authors advocate for interdisciplinarity, it is usually limited to within the social sciences, and does not embrace academics from significantly different disciplines. Science shops have also advocated for interdisciplinarity (Gresle et al, 2021); however, this tends to be limited to the sciences. In this paper, we focus on the dynamics of CBPR when working in an engaged way with community partners and mixed-level, interdisciplinary teams of students, including those from social science, medicine, biology and engineering backgrounds.…”

“…Using elements of both approaches, OH facilitates collaborative research between the university and community-living vulnerable people with chronic and often complex health issues. The OH science shop model translates principles of RRI (Gresle et al, 2021) and CBPR into practice, democratising and enhancing research. The case studies presented here explore OH projects in which the following research questions were co-developed by students and two community partner organisations:…”

From talking the talk to walking the walk

“…Structural linkages between FPNs and higher education institutes also support the FPNs, as these networks often lack resources and capacity and are not yet making use of transformative research methodologies that researchers might be more familiar with (e.g., reflexive monitoring in action) (see Chapter 9). Further research is needed to investigate the extent to which intermediary units, such as Science Shops (Gresle et al, 2021), can be linked to such networks to strengthen the institutionalisation of these intermediaries and to more effectively and structurally match real-world actors and challenges to university courses and curricula.…”