Discussion
SAID
The application of community conversations within formative research enabled us to gather deep and rich understandings of communities, contexts and power dynamics, prior to finalising the design and implementation of our intervention. Our approach in this study avoids the assumption that generating an understanding of communities of place — even within a singular state, is sufficient to understand and define an approach that 1 day hopes to run across an entire state. By working across the local government area, and importantly, dividing participants into smaller groups that represent key stakeholders for an intervention, we were able to confirm a series of priorities and perspectives that could be shared by the whole group, increasing the likelihood of uptake when the formal intervention was rolled out in the future, because of a deep understanding of the varied contexts and experiences of these contexts among participants.Participants saw this procedure as an opportunity to learn, unlearn and relearn. In all conversations, participants appreciated the fact that they were able to learn new things from other members, they embraced the fact that they could argue out points and reach a concensus of what is obtainable/workable within their community, citing examples from programmes that were carried out in the past and how they could be leveraged on.While there is much said about the importance of participation in trial development, the type and aim of participation matters. As mentioned earlier, Susan White’s paradigm [In response to critiques in wider development spaces, we have been called to prioritise opportunities for more representative and transformative forms of participation. While representative forms of participation are interested in both inclusion and sustainability within projects, transformative participation views the inclusion of community actors as both the means and the end, such that community involvement results in opportunities for meaningful change, that has an impact on both processes and outcome [Our aim was to create opportunities for representative and transformative types of participation within the trial process, with an emphasis on intervention aspects, among a large group of community members in the sites where our trial would eventually be implemented. CCs offered the opportunity for community members to fully shape the design of the intervention and incentive structures. This, alongside wider processes of collaboration and consensus to shape some aspects of design, contributed to representative forms of participation. Because final decision-making around the intervention remained with the wider team, transformative participation was not achieved in this instance. However, as outlined in the results, learnings from the CCs also shaped the structure and content of the PLA intervention, the mode of delivery, as well as aspects of evaluation [We also believe that through dialogue coordinated in a respectful and open forum, the approach established opportunities for interpersonal transformation, with young women able to feel heard and have their views acknowledged in forums where this is often unlikely. Key to this, was the use of visual and image-based activities — as these ensured that even those with low literacy were not excluded from dialogue opportunities. Thus, the activities not only gave members a sense of ownership over the intervention, but had the opportunity to improve future communication within community networks more broadly.Furthermore, embedding CC methodology within trial design processes provides a pathway to engage everyday citizens as experts in the processes of knowledge production in more meaningful ways. Recent work by Abimbola [