Effectiveness of Mentoring for Improving Lived Experience Engagement in Research: A Pilot Study in a Higher Education Setting

Lived experience engagement is becoming a growing expectation in research. However, in the higher education sector, academic researchers and teaching staff may lack the skills and confidence to engage lived experience experts. This study is an evaluation of a mentoring program for staff at an Australian university developed in order to build capacity to engage lived experience experts in teaching and research. The program paired staff who wished to improve their engagement with lived experience experts with staff who had substantial experience in this domain. Following the conclusion of the program, we conducted a survey and interviews with mentees and mentors in the program to understand what impact, if any, the program had on their capability to engage lived experience experts in their work. 13 program participants completed the survey and 14 participated in an interview. We followed a realist evaluation approach to study design and analysis of the data, producing 5 Context-Mechanism-Outcome configurations. Overall, our analysis suggested that the program had strong effectiveness in building the confidence of mentees. Effectiveness was limited when mentees did not have a current or future project planned. Success also seemed to be determined by the relational aspect of the mentoring. This study advances a realist account of mentoring by specifying how relational conditions function as generative mechanisms for researcher capacity building in lived experience engagement. Rather than treating trust and flexibility as background enablers, the analysis demonstrates how mechanisms activate under conditions such as epistemic alignment. In doing so, the study contributes to evaluating relational interventions within research institutions, broadening attention from individual capacity building to explore the conditions under which epistemic change becomes possible. Our research suggests that future similar programs should be developed, implemented and evaluated in order to support lived experience engagement in research.