Improving gerontological research dissemination: PARTNERship with people with lived experience in research symposia

Presentations at academic conferences are an important avenue for discussing scientific problems and disseminating discoveries. Despite efforts to modernize conference session formats in gerontology and other health research fields, session content is critiqued as being overly technical and sometimes disconnected from real-world problems and solutions. In this forum article, the researchers assert that partnering with people with lived experience can help gerontological researchers develop and share conference presentations that are enriched, accessible, and better aligned with important aging-related issues. This article provides guidelines for this type of partnership. The researchers review participatory research approaches and describe the current landscape of engagement in partnership with people with lived experiences to disseminate gerontological research at conferences. They then describe their own recent partnership with a person with lived experience when presenting a symposium at a Gerontological Society of America Annual Scientific Meeting. This experience is presented as a case study that helped us to develop the PARTNER Model for symposium development and delivery. An overview of this model is provided, connecting each tenet to the researchers' experiences in their recent partnership. The article concludes with recommendations for improvements that can support researchers to thoughtfully engage in these types of partnership for future conference presentations.