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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

3.05 Getting more regular information

One of the difficulties with many common approaches to research and consultation is that they tend to be occasional or ‘ad hoc’ exercises that may be time consuming and costly. These may not produce useful, actionable information based on recent experience. Often they provide summative information after a project or initiative has completed rather than formative information that can help to develop and adapt an initiative as it proceeds.

It is likely to be necessary to consider how to gather service users’ views on a more frequent basis. There is interest amongst social landlords in getting more ‘real time’ feedback. Action research works in this way by testing out ideas as they are developed to provide feedback about what’s working and how. Adaptation of other research and consultation approaches may also be able to provide more formative and frequent information.

• It may be possible to make better use of existing sources of information and staff-customer contact; data collection systems may require relatively simple adaptation to enable them to provide fuller information for feedback purposes.

• Survey design and sampling techniques may be adapted to produce more frequent data and continuous monitoring surveys used.

• Analysis of comments, compliments and complaints can also be a valuable source of feedback.

• Making the most of feedback from staff will also be likely to produce useful insights on a more routine basis.

• Techniques such as significant event analysis can also yield more regular data by focusing on particular incidents considered significant, in order to learn and improve. This could be used with staff, service users or existing groups.

Smaller scale, targeted and clearly focused approaches will also be less resource intensive and able to complement occasional larger research and consultation exercises. Clarity of purpose and a strong utilisation-focus will avoid the temptation to tackle too broad a range of issues within one exercise, which will tend to run the risk of not providing the depth of information that can be clearly acted upon.

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