We can see that more and more research is including lived experience. This means working together with people who the research will affect. There are lots of different terms to describe this way of working. One of these is codesign. Codesign can lead to better research outcomes.

Previous research has shown that the use of codesign with young people is increasing. But what we knew about the topic was still unclear. Our research aimed to further understand codesign. We focused on young people involved in health and social sciences research.

We first needed to gather information from other studies. We followed a process called a ‘scoping review’. We found 49 studies which used codesign to work with people aged 15-24 years old. Codesign was not well explained. It was one popular way of working with young people, but it was not the most common.

Many of the studies used multiple terms similar to codesign. The same study often mentioned other ways of collaborating with young people. For example, coproduction or participatory research. This tells us that different ways of working together might overlap. But it is still important that researchers are transparent about their approach. They need to explain why they chose to conduct research in a certain way.

It’s hard for us to properly understand codesign when people use different words to describe similar things. It can also make research confusing and we might misinterpret what it means. We need to decide on a clear meaning for codesign. We also need a framework or model to standardise this approach. Without these, we can’t understand the true impact of codesign or test its success.

About the author:

Rosie (she/they) is a lived experience research assistant living with mental illness. She loves the challenge of pursuing her interests in literature and health sciences concurrently and is proudly the only poet-physiotherapist that she knows of.