Working with Lived-Experience Advisory Groups to Advance Equity in Health Psychology Research in the Netherlands and Flanders

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Persistent health disparities, rooted in unequal distributions of power, resources and opportunities, emphasize the urgent need for more inclusive research practices in health psychology. This paper presents citizen advisory groups, composed of individuals with lived experience of health inequities, as a feasible approach to foster such practices. Citizen advisory groups provide researchers with insight into the lived experience of these individuals, facilitating research that is aligned with their context and needs. Compared to full-scale participatory research, these groups require relatively modest resources while still enabling meaningful community engagement.In the Netherlands and Flanders, citizen advisory groups have gained traction in recent years. Drawing on experiences from existing groups, literature, and researchers’ input from conference roundtables, this paper aims to disseminate experiences with, and lessons learned from working with advisory groups. Thereby, this paper contributes to researchers’ knowledge about the use and implementation of advisory groups. This helps to support researchers in assessing whether a citizen advisory group is suitable for their work, aiming to lower the barriers to start one. This paper covers how citizen advisory groups may overcome researchers’ barriers to inclusive research, the value of advisory groups across different phases of the research process, and how to overcome challenges in the implementation and sustainability of citizen advisory groups. Ultimately, the paper presents citizen advisory groups as a concrete step towards more inclusive research practices in health psychology.