Justification
Developing the CAYR methodology was made possible in part by grant provider ZonMw.
Partly in response to the Council for Public Health and Society (Raad voor Volksgezondheid en Samenleving, RVS) report ‘Zonder context geen bewijs’ (No evidence without context) from June 2017, grant provider ZonMw commissioned HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht in September 2017 to develop an appropriate research approach for the long-term care and support programme. From this, the first version of the CAYR manual followed. To gain experience with the CAYR methodology, ZonMw opened a call in August 2020 for consortia-to-be that wanted to apply the CAYR methodology with the support of CAYR developers, to jointly develop a practice-based research proposal. This call was termed ‘Phase I’, because an application could be submitted for grant writing of a grant application for the execution phase of the research project on the basis of this call, with this being termed ‘Phase II’. Four projects have been accepted. All projects submitted an application prepared for the follow-up round (LZO CAYR Phase II). Following the LZO CAYR Phase I pilot, the ‘Gewoon Bijzonder’ (GB; ‘Just Special’) programme opened a similar call in April of 2021. In it, three projects were accepted, all three of which then submitted a detailed application for the follow-up round (GB CAYR Phase II). The supervision of these seven consortia by the developers of the methodology was set up as a design-oriented research project (Van Aken and Andriessen, 2011). In it, research was conducted on the success and efficacy of the CAYR methodology. During this research project, working methods and supporting tools and workshops were designed, tested and evaluated with stakeholders. All descriptions, supporting tools, working methods and workshops were tailored to the participating consortia during the research project. The results of these studies have been reported elsewhere in two research papers (Andriessen, Ganzevles, & Welbie, 2022; Andriessen, Ganzevles & Welbie 2023). In addition, based on the results of these studies, version 1.0 of the CAYR manual was written in 2022.
In the application of the CAYR methodology by the seven consortia, as described above, the developers of the CAYR methodology played an important role as process managers. As a result, the seven consortia depended on the developers for the application of the CAYR methodology, which hampered the transferability and hence wider applicability of the CAYR methodology. In light of this, the methodology was made available under the name ‘CRJO light’ (‘CAYR light’) in 2022, in the form of a ’train-the-facilitator’ approach to consortia interested in submitting a grant application following the grant call ‘Passende zorg bevorderen aan de hand van actieonderzoek in de langdurige zorg en ondersteuning’ (Promoting appropriate care using action research in long-term care and support) within the Long-Term Care and Support programme. The deployment of CAYR light had primarily a professionalisation objective for project leaders and facilitators of the consortia-to-be in the Appropriate Care programme. Project leaders and/or process managers from the consortia who were considering submitting a project proposal for the Appropriate Care round were offered the opportunity to participate in training on using CAYR. These training courses were offered in both the project idea phase and the detailed application phase. Following a workshop, participants were able to apply the CAYR steps themselves within their own consortium. Between training sessions, participants applied the knowledge while learning by experience. Feedback sessions were regularly held with the developers of the CAYR methodology. This applied not only to the consortia-to-be that participated in the CAYR light training courses, but also to the seven consortia from the earlier pilot phase that were now in the implementation phase of their ZonMw-funded studies. In this way, the CAYR methodology was further developed in an action-oriented manner, refined and also made available in other formats. New applications of the CAYR methodology have emerged through this approach. For example, thinking in four types of research objectives as used in CAYR, has been combined with by the Impact Plan Approach of the NWO. This helps consortia to put more effort towards increasing impact when working on a research proposal, by developing a sound theory of change (Stein and Valters, 2012; Vogel, 2012). In addition, the methodology is no longer offered only as a complete process with a fixed sequence of steps, but allows for the user to use workshops, working methods and supporting tools as separate elements, to customise these and integrate these into their own process of arriving at a research proposal. The results of evaluations that took place during this action-oriented continued development have been reported elsewhere in a research paper (Andriessen, Welbie and Ganzevles 2024). In addition, this approach resulted in CAYR manual 2.0 (Andriessen, Welbie, Van Beest, Ganzevles and Zielhuis 2024) and this website, on which all knowledge and materials relating to CAYR have been made open access.