# Development and validation of the UserInvolve comprehensive toolkit for evaluating co-production in research: A guiding resource for researchers

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a toolkit to evaluate co-production in mental health research, offering practical tools to assess collaboration between researchers and stakeholders.

## Contribution

The paper presents a validated, comprehensive toolkit for evaluating co-production in mental health research, addressing a critical gap in the field.

## Key findings

- The toolkit includes a project initiation guide, process-oriented survey, and impact-focused interview guides.
- The co-production approach was iteratively tested and refined with stakeholder feedback.
- The toolkit supports evaluation of involvement, process, and impact across a research project's lifecycle.

## Abstract

Despite the evident trend in health research to emphasise co-production approaches, there is a lack of established, comprehensive and concrete strategies and evaluation methods to effectively guide and assess them. This project aimed to develop, validate, and test a toolkit designed to enhance and evaluate co-productions in mental health research. The toolkit includes practical evaluation tools, such as a structured questionnaire and tailored interview guides, to support the initiation of research projects and assess the involvement, process and impact of co-production efforts.

This project used a co-production approach with formative research design to develop a comprehensive toolkit for evaluating the process and impact of co-production in mental health research. Conducted between 2022 and 2024, the project involved iterative engagement with diverse stakeholder groups, providing a dynamic testbed for developing, validating, and field-testing the instruments. The paper outlines the four-phase process: (1) toolkit generation, (2) validation, (3) field-testing, and (4) completion, detailing how the co-production approach shaped the toolkit’s design, relevance, usability, and rigor.

The result of this project is a structured, practical, and comprehensive co-production evaluation toolkit designed specifically for mental health research, potentially involving a wide range of partnerships. The toolkit includes a project initiation guide, a process-oriented survey and interview-guide for mid- and post-project evaluations, and an impact-focused post-project group interview guide.

The findings address a critical gap in mental health research by developing a structured, practical, and comprehensive co-production evaluation toolkit. The toolkit offers comprehensive strategies for evaluating involvement and both the processes and impacts of co-production throughout a project’s lifecycle.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40900-025-00759-3.

There is an evident trend in health research to emphasise co-production approaches, where service users, health care providers and researchers collaborate together, to improve the mental health research. Nevertheless, there is a lack of established methods to guide and evaluate these kinds of co-productions. The aim with the study was to develop, validate and field-test a toolkit that can be used to evaluate co-productions within mental health research, throughout its life cycle.

The first draft of the toolkit was based on a mix of existing evaluation instruments and strategies. These were specified and developed into a toolkit. As a second step, this toolkit was validated by an expert group, including representatives from service user organisations and service user providers/agencies. As a third step, the toolkit was field-tested on various co-produced research projects within a research program, called UserInvolve. As a last step, the collected feedback from the field-tests was analyzed and the toolkit finalized.

This work resulted in a practical evaluation toolkit, including a survey and interview guides. These can be used to support the initiation of a co-produced research project and evaluate the co-production in terms of involvement, process and impacts. The UserInvolve co-production evaluation toolkit can be found at the website https://www.umu.se/forskning/grupper/userinvolve/.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40900-025-00759-3.