Community Researchers and Community Researcher Training: Reflections from the UK’s Productive Margin’s: Regulating for Engagement Programme

This paper explores the role of training as a mechanism to support and enable community researchers within co‐produced research projects. The paper draws on the authors work within the UK’s co‐produced five‐year research programme: Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement 1 . The authors describe the role of community researchers and community researcher training within four of the programme’s distinct research projects. Drawing on evaluative data from each project and evaluative data collected during the delivery of research training, the authors argue that rigorous,flexible and reflexive researcher training can go a significant way towards supporting the development of the skills needed to work as a community researcher on a co‐produced research project. The authors also argue that training can be a space in which the transformation of traditional power dynamics that co‐production aspires too can be negotiated. The authors contend that the training community researchers receive is an important; but often neglected, detail of co‐produced research accounts and reason that, going forwards, details of training including: content, delivery‐mode, evaluation and reflections, should be included in accounts. The authors propose a simple design framework to aid planning future community researcher training within co‐produced, participatory and action‐research projects.