Innovative Methods to Gather, Understand, And Incorporate Diverse Lived Experiences Into Dementia Research

Aging and dementia researchers continue to face challenges in recruiting and retaining participants who represent demographically diverse communities. This continued and critical lack of representation threatens the generalizability and applicability of countless study findings and severely diminishes the field’s impact on clinical outcomes. Recruitment science evidence strongly recommends that to achieve equity researchers should design and conduct research hand‐in‐hand with the input of potential and current participants, as well as their loved ones. To do so, partnerships between researchers and demographically diverse communities must be built and maintained before, during, and after individual studies. Indeed, literature indicates that persons from demographically diverse communities want to contribute to research, even beyond traditional research participation, including serving on community advisory boards and sharing their lived experiences in public forums. This symposium will discuss innovative methods currently being used to gather, understand, and incorporate diverse lived experiences with the goal of improving aging and dementia research generalizability and applicability.