Who Counts as a Stakeholder in a Research Study?

Who Actually Has a Stake in Your Research?

Once you decide to involve stakeholders in research, an apparently simple question becomes surprisingly important: who counts as a stakeholder?

The answer is not always obvious. If you are studying a school intervention, are the stakeholders the students who experience it, the teachers who deliver it, the administrators who decide whether to adopt it, or the parents affected by its consequences? If you are studying a healthcare service, should you involve patients, caregivers, clinicians, hospital administrators, policymakers, or all of them?

The temptation is to create a long list of everyone remotely connected to the topic. That usually does not solve the problem. Stakeholder identification is not about finding as many people as possible. It is about determining whose experiences, interests, responsibilities, decisions, or potential use of the findings give them a meaningful stake in the particular research.

A Stakeholder Has a Meaningful Stake in the Research or Its Consequences

How to Identify the Stakeholders Who Matter to a Study

Stakeholder is a relationship to the research, not a job title

The word stakeholder is used differently across research traditions and disciplines. In comparative effectiveness research, for example, one influential framework defined stakeholders broadly as individuals, organizations, or communities with a direct interest in the process and outcomes of research or related decision-making. Patient-centered research frameworks similarly recognize multiple groups whose experiences or decisions may be informed by research evidence.

The useful principle is that stakeholder status arises from a person's or organization's relationship to the particular research problem. Someone does not become a relevant stakeholder merely because they belong to a category that researchers commonly engage.

A school principal may be central to a study of school-level technology adoption but peripheral to a laboratory study of a learning mechanism. A national patient organization might be highly relevant to research on treatment priorities for a particular condition but have no meaningful role in an unrelated public-health project.

This is why identifying stakeholders should follow from the purpose of stakeholder engagement in the particular research, rather than beginning with a generic list of people to invite.

Several different relationships can create a stake in research

People may have a stake for different reasons. Some live with the condition, problem, service, policy, or environment being studied. Others provide relevant professional services, make decisions that could be informed by the findings, represent affected populations, implement interventions, fund services, or work within organizations where the findings could eventually be used.

These categories are illustrative rather than exhaustive. They also overlap. A nurse might simultaneously be a clinician, a hospital employee, a researcher, a caregiver, and a patient. PCORI explicitly recognizes that individuals may belong to several stakeholder communities and may therefore bring more than one perspective to an engagement activity.

People directly affected by the research deserve particular attention

One of the first questions should be: who experiences the issue being studied or could experience the consequences of decisions informed by the research?

In health research, this often brings patients, caregivers, and affected communities into consideration. In education research, it could include students, teachers, families, or other members of the educational community. A workplace study might involve employees as well as managers. Research concerning an environmental intervention could affect residents who live in the relevant area even if they have no formal role in the organization conducting the project.

Directly affected groups can provide knowledge that institutional or professional representatives may not possess. A clinician can explain how a treatment is delivered, for example, but that does not necessarily reveal what receiving the treatment is like for a patient. Likewise, a university administrator may understand institutional policy without necessarily representing how students experience that policy.

People who will use the findings may also be stakeholders

A stakeholder does not necessarily have to experience the phenomenon personally. Some people have a stake because they make decisions that the research is intended to inform.

PCORI's research methodology standards, for example, recognize that relevant stakeholders may include clinicians, purchasers, payers, industry, hospitals, health systems, policymakers, and training institutions. Depending on the research question, these groups may be end users of the research or participants in decisions informed by the evidence.

The equivalent groups will differ outside healthcare. A school district deciding whether to adopt an educational intervention, a government agency considering a policy, or a nonprofit organization deciding how to allocate services may all have a legitimate stake in relevant research.

Researchers and funders can be stakeholders too

Stakeholder does not necessarily mean “non-researcher.” Researchers, research organizations, and funders can have legitimate stakes in a research problem. PCORI, for instance, includes researchers among its stakeholder categories in patient-centered research.

That does not mean their interests should automatically receive the same weight as those of people directly affected by the research. Stakeholder identification and stakeholder influence are different questions. Identifying a group acknowledges that it has a relevant relationship to the study. It does not settle how much authority that group should have over particular decisions.

The appropriate distribution of influence among research partners therefore requires a separate judgment about roles, expertise, affected interests, and decision responsibilities.

Organizations can be stakeholders, but organizations are not single viewpoints

Researchers often identify an institution as a stakeholder: “the university,” “the hospital,” “the community organization,” or “the government.” That shorthand can conceal important differences.

A hospital administrator, nurse, physician, patient advocate, and frontline employee may all work within or around the same health system while experiencing a proposed change very differently. Similarly, senior university administrators, faculty members, students, and support staff do not automatically share one institutional perspective.

If the purpose of engagement requires multiple viewpoints, inviting one organizational representative may not adequately capture them.

A community is rarely one stakeholder with one opinion

The same caution applies to communities. Researchers sometimes speak of “the community” as though it were a single actor capable of supplying a representative view. Communities usually contain different experiences, priorities, levels of power, and relationships to the research topic.

A community organization may provide valuable knowledge and access, but it should not automatically be assumed to speak for every community member. Formal leaders may have different priorities from younger residents, marginalized groups, service users, informal leaders, or people who do not participate in established organizations.

This becomes particularly important when research adopts approaches in which communities have substantial roles in decision-making, such as community-based participatory research.

Stakeholder categories should not substitute for actual people

Writing “patients,” “teachers,” or “policymakers” in a stakeholder map is only the beginning. Researchers still need to ask which patients, which teachers, or which policymakers are relevant.

Consider characteristics that could materially change people's experience of the research problem. Depending on the study, these might involve geographic location, type or severity of a condition, professional role, institutional setting, access to services, socioeconomic circumstances, or previous experience with the intervention.

This is not an instruction to make every stakeholder group statistically representative of an entire population. Stakeholder engagement and population sampling serve different purposes. Rather, researchers should avoid assuming that one convenient individual can automatically represent a diverse constituency.

Research participants and research stakeholders can overlap

A person recruited to provide data may also have a stake in the research. However, being a stakeholder does not automatically make that person an engaged research partner.

A patient completing a questionnaire may simultaneously be a stakeholder and a research participant. If the same patient joins an advisory group that helps revise recruitment materials or select outcomes, that person is also functioning as an engaged partner. Understanding the difference between research participants and research partners helps prevent these roles from being conflated.

Not every conceivable stakeholder needs to be involved

Once the definition becomes broad, almost anyone can appear connected to a research topic if the chain of consequences is extended far enough. That does not mean every possible stakeholder belongs in the project.

The practical task is to identify relevant stakeholders. Relevance depends on what the engagement is supposed to accomplish.

If you want to make participant information understandable, people similar to the intended participants may be especially valuable. If you are assessing whether an intervention can operate in routine practice, frontline practitioners and organizational decision-makers may matter. If the research could inform national policy, policymakers or organizations responsible for implementation may become relevant.

Stakeholder identification should therefore be connected to specific research decisions rather than treated as a ceremonial exercise at the beginning of a project.

Identifying Stakeholders for an Educational Technology Study

The researchers should not automatically invite representatives from every group to every meeting. Instead, they can connect stakeholder involvement to the decisions being made.

Students might be particularly important when deciding whether proposed outcomes capture meaningful aspects of the learning experience. Instructors may identify whether implementation procedures are realistic. Technical staff may clarify operational constraints. Institutional decision-makers may explain what evidence would actually be needed before adoption could be considered.

The stakeholder map therefore emerges from the research problem and the intended engagement, not from a predetermined checklist.

Common Mistakes When Deciding Who Counts as a Stakeholder

Build Your Stakeholder List From the Research Question Outward

Rather than beginning with a standard list of stakeholder categories, begin with your study. Ask what is being investigated, who experiences it, who influences it, who makes relevant decisions, and who could realistically use the evidence.

After identifying possible groups, examine omissions. Whose experience could materially alter how you understand the problem? Who bears consequences but has little formal authority? Who will be expected to implement the findings? Who might disagree with the people already represented?

This matters because stakeholder selection can reproduce existing power structures. The easiest people to recruit are often established organizational contacts, senior professionals, articulate advocates, or people already comfortable working with researchers. Their perspectives may be valuable, but convenience should not silently determine whose knowledge enters the project.

Once relevant groups have been identified, the next question is not merely who to invite. Researchers must decide what each person's role will be, what influence they can reasonably have, and what support they need to contribute meaningfully.

Before Finalizing Your Stakeholder List

Frequently Asked Questions About Research Stakeholders

The Right Stakeholders Depend on the Research

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