This project employed community researchers as a means of improving community engagement around their Private Water Supplies (PWS) in rural Scotland. In this paper, we reflect on working with community researchers in terms of the benefits and challenges of the approach for future rural research that seeks to improve community engagement. The paper (1) critiques the involvement of community researchers for rural community engagement, drawing on the experiences in this project and (2) provides suggestions for good practice for working with community researchers in rural communities’ research. We offer some context in terms of the role of community members in research, the importance of PWS, our approach to community researchers, followed by the methodological approach and findings and our conclusions to highlight that community researchers can be beneficial for enhancing community engagement, employability, and social capital. Future community researcher approaches need to be fully funded to ensure core researchers can fulfil their duty of care, which should not stop when data collection is finished. Community researchers need to be supported in two main ways: as continuing faces of the project after the official project end date and to transfer their newly acquired skills to future employment opportunities.

该项目聘用了社区研究人员，以改善社区在苏格兰农村地区的私人供水（PWS）方面的参与度。在本文中，我们反思了与社区研究人员合作，以寻求未来的农村研究方法的好处和挑战，这些方法旨在提高社区参与度。本文（1）借鉴该项目的经验，对社区研究人员参与农村社区参与进行了批评；（2）为在农村社区研究中与社区研究人员合作的良好实践提供了建议。我们就社区成员在研究中的作用，PWS的重要性，我们对社区研究人员的态度，其次是方法论方法和发现以及我们的结论，以突出表明社区研究人员可以有益于增强社区参与，就业能力和社会资本。需要为未来的社区研究人员方法提供充分的资金，以确保核心研究人员能够履行他们的谨慎职责，并在数据收集完成后就不会停止。社区研究人员需要以两种主要方式获得支持：在正式项目结束日期之后作为项目的延续面孔，以及将其新获得的技能转移到未来的就业机会中。