Young people’s vital role in shaping research with Sophie Jones

Sophie Jones has been involved in research since the age of 14 after joining a health and social care research engagement project as a teenager. Sophie is now the Senior Public Involvement Officer at DECIPHer and runs ALPHA, a research group designed to find out the views of young people on public health topics.Working with 14 - 25-year-olds, ALPHA aims to change public health policy by getting young people involved from the start of research. In this podcast Sophie and host Emma Yhnell will discuss the impact young people have on research. A huge achievement of Sophie’s was her involvement in a campaign to ban smoking in parks. Find out in this episode how she made this change to public health policy in Wales and her answer to our question: Where would we be without research?Why did you want to get involved? (03:19)Examples of how to get involved as a young person (05:49)The ban smoking in park campaign (10:42)What do you gain from participating in research? (16:14)What differences do the voices of young people make to research? (18:16)