CoActD3.2: Digital and non-digital tools for conducting research

DISCLAIMER: The present Project Deliverable has been submitted to the European Commission for review. The information and views set out in this report are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein. 

The CoAct (Co-designing Citizen Social Science for Collective Action) project proposes to face social global issues by placing citizens in a vulnerable situation at the centre of the research. This approach represents a new understanding of Citizen Social Science (CSS), as participatory research co-designed with citizen groups sharing a social concern.

One of the social issues targeted is Mental Health Care (R&I Action #1, WP3) and specifically mental health social support networks. Social support networks refer to people's social environment, which is generated informally, not professionally. In this frame, the R&I Action #1 has been co-designed with Co-Researchers (CoRes) which are persons with self-experience in mental health and relatives, acting as experts in the field.  They participate to all steps of the research, together with the promotors of the research: Universitat de Barcelona-UB and Federació Salut Mental Catalunya-FSMC.

This Deliverable D3.2: “Digital and non-digital tools for conducting research” describes and reflects on two tools that are cornerstones of the research co-design in this context:

1. The Research Diary. This hardcover publication, that was tailormade for R&I Action #1, was ideated to guide the CoRes during the process of microstories co-creation. It has been proved to serve as a useful bridge between the online co-creation sessions, done in pandemic times and the CoRes’ offline individual work on writing down microstories related to their personal experiences.
2. The Chatbot. This Telegram-based chatbot is the first example, to our knowledge, of a chatbot used by a citizen science project. Its contents are fully provided by the CoRes and the promotors of the research. The chatbot consists of a package of python3 code and include several blocks of contents. 

The Research Diary is openly accessible via Zenodo[1] and the Chatbot code is an Open Source code on Github[2], in order to improve their accessibility and potential re-use.

[1] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5342488

[2] https://github.com/Chaotique/CoActuem_per_la_Salut_Mental_Chatbot