Table 3 List of recommendations by interviewees

Tailoring strategies and adapting

Be very much culturally sensitive and friendly (Interviewee 6).

Researchers should not have their own mission. They need to go with the people’s mission (Interviewee 6).

You always need to prepare like nothing of what you decide is going to work. Be flexible (Interviewee 6).

Meet people where they are. Tailor your approach and methods to the setting in which you are working. Even within the same country, from community to community, an approach is going to need to vary (Interviewee 3)

Engaging and teaming

Make sure that the process is truly co-created and not a tokenistic way of saying, Oh, we got feedback from those people (Interviewee 8).

Be honest with your community about what you will have at the end of this process. (Interviewee 2).

Be creative in the activities that you plan (Interviewee 1).

Create a multidisciplinary team (Interviewee 1).

Be as inclusive and representative as possible to enhance the reach and involve people that might not be as enthusiast as others (Interviewee 8).

Assessing needs and evaluating

Try to ensure that those interventions are sustainable. For instance, make sure, from the beginning, that the intervention is evaluated in terms of feasibility (Interviewee 8).

Really understand the data before starting with your thorough analysis (Interviewee 7).

Communicate and talk to as many people as you can about the project to understand the context and intervention (Interviewee 5).

It is hard to address the tensions that exist with more traditional research approach and wanting to quantify the value of participation. You don’t necessarily always have to quantify its value to argue for its importance (Interviewee 4).