Community coproduction in Sweden - the role of trust for health promotion in segregated neighbouhoods

During the pandemic, it became apparent how neighborhoods characterized by low institutional trust have a low tendency to use and be involved in health promotion and preventive services such as vaccination and testing.

One way for welfare actors to build relationships with these neighborhoods is to reach out to the community level, and by involving citizens through for instance community coproduction.

In the Swedish welfare society, the community-level has not been an arena for welfare services due to the universalist welfare model.

This project aims to study how citizen involvement strategies directed towards the community, as community coproduction, can be designed and used in a Swedish setting.

The project uses theory trust to understand the potential of community coproduction for health promotion purposes.Methodologically, the project will employ statistical methods for analyzing survey data and a multiple case study, with both interviews and policy documents.

The project will start with the quantitative study of survey data, attempting to identify which community-level characteristics have strong correlation with trust in healthcare.

This will provide a useful mapping of which types of local communities that is likely to have a low trust in healthcare.

This knowledge will be further used in the analysis of the case study, as factors that may be considered when designing community coproduction projects. The case study will be divided into two parts.

One part, based on interviews, will mainly study experiences of community coproduction projects that was created during the pandemic, for health promotion purposes.

The other part of the case study will use a broader perspective and try to identify if and how community coproduction, as a strategy for citizen involvement, can be used in a non-crisis time, and how health promotion can be directed towards the community level in the Swedish context.