Research and consultation play an important role in local areas, helping local authorities (and others) to understand what residents think about where they live and gather vital feedback on services.
Many councils run regular resident surveys to gauge opinions and give them the opportunity to ‘have their say’. But as public sector cuts have led to significantly reduced research budgets for many, how these surveys are delivered in different areas varies. Whilst some are able to adopt robust but expensive methods such as telephone interviews and postal surveys, others increasingly rely on lower cost methods such as open access, self-selecting online surveys to reach residents.
And whilst these surveys can still deliver a good return on paper, often when you lift up the bonnet it is clear that the sample does not always reflect the population. In particular, it is not a secret that many local authorities struggle to reach young people with their resident surveys. Sure, we can boost samples and set minimum quotas for some fieldwork methods, but this again is not cheap. And is that really tackling the root of the issue?
Why would young people (let’s say aged 16 to 24) respond to a typical local authority survey? Take a look at the Local Government Association’s recommended questions that many councils adopt. They are good questions, designed by industry and sector experts and cognitively tested. But still; would your 18-year-old self have responded? Would you even be able to give an answer on things like satisfaction with the way your council runs things and value-for-money?
Case in point
We work closely with Pendle Borough Council, a district council that, like many, had reached the point of no return with their resident survey. What started as a best practice stratified random probability postal survey over a decade ago was now an open access, non-probability, online survey relying largely on their social media and e-news audience. Whilst the survey looked the same and asked the same questions, the quality of the methodology and sample was letting it down. With no control over the response, they were finding that the ‘usual suspects’ were responding; namely, a sample dominated by white residents aged 45 and over.
The instinct is to simply think: how do we get this survey to more young people? But what if reaching people isn’t the problem? We needed to start from the beginning, think about the process and the questions we’re asking.
In early 2021, we challenged the council’s management team to take stock and think differently. And they responded.
We agreed to treat the whole project as a piece of research. Explore why young people don’t engage and work with young people from the beginning. We put forward a co-designed model with the ambition of working with the local college to involve their students in the research process. This wasn’t overly defined or prescriptive. That was the whole point of the project. Instead, we developed a simple research brief with the council and then encouraged them to let go and trust the students.
An overview of the project
The aims of this project were:
- To engage young people with the research process and give them a unique opportunity to develop their skills and learn alongside a local research company
- To co-design research methods with young people and 'seldom heard' communities in the area
- To pilot a new research approach, with the focus on understanding what life is like in the area and how residents are feeling
- To co-analyse and report on the findings of this pilot research
- To reflect on the project, identifying lessons and changes to adopt for future research in the area so we better engage with our communities
- We delivered a series of six sessions with a small group of first year students at the local college, introducing students to the basic principles of research and evaluation.
- The students co-designed the resident survey, reviewing the previous survey and introducing new sections that are important to them, such as climate change and safety.
- The students, the college and colleagues from the council marketing team co-designed an engagement and communication plan. The students and the college supported in promoting and sharing the survey, whether that was visiting tutorial groups, appearing in promotional videos or being interviewed on local radio.
The response
The result was a bigger and more diverse response to the local area survey than had been achieved for many years. Response numbers were still relatively modest, but it was progress. And it was as much about who responded, as how many.
- The number of responses increased from 510 in the previous council survey to 743
- 28% of respondents were aged between 16 and 34, compared to 9% in the previous council survey
- 17% of respondents were in an ethnic minority group, similar to the actual Pendle population, and compared to just 3% in the previous council survey
Putting the level of response to one side, this project was also about what we all learnt from doing it. Here are 10 things we’ve reflected on.
1. You’ve got to be open and willing to try different things
That goes both for us as practitioners and senior leaders at the council. I’m sure this is a reason why projects like this never make it off the ground. It can be hard to let go.
2. Build in time to have the right conversations
You need time to develop relationships with partners. You can’t do something like this on your own. And timing is important, particularly when dealing with a college around exams and holidays. It took us months just to find the right person, but it was worth the wait.
3. You get out what you put in
A lot of our time and energy went into doing this right. We had to shift our focus so it was as much about giving to the college and students as it was about getting support and input from them. It took time to develop training materials, time to get to and deliver those sessions, time to build a rapport with the student group.
4. Be prepared to adapt as you go
We didn’t know what the students were going to come up with. That was the whole point of the project. We went with their ideas. So between sessions we were having to adapt, whether that was testing their ideas in our survey software or tweaking future sessions to build on their ideas.
5. Accept what it’s not
This wasn’t about agonising over fieldwork methods, sampling approaches and running with industry standard benchmarking questions. All this comes at a cost when budgets in the sector are tight. Even if we went down this route, we wouldn’t be engaging with young people and taking their views on board. We wanted to take a participatory approach to our research.
6. A research project can be about more than the research
To us, this was so much more than a research project.
Our students developed new skills and experiences. They had new opportunities and grew in confidence by taking part in a promotional video and being interviewed on the local radio.
As researchers, we got unique feedback on research from a young person’s perspective, from the language we use in surveys or qualitative exercises to how (and where) we might reach young people in the future.
The council benefited and not just from the quality of the research and more diverse sample. College students found out what the council does and why it is important to have a voice. This can only improve the awareness and perceptions of the council amongst young people.
7. Being independent helped
We weren’t ‘the council’. Students were learning about research from a local research company. They seemed to be more open with their feedback about the council. We were probably naturally a bit more open to that feedback.
8. In-person versus online delivery matters
This was an example of a project where face-to-face delivery works much better than online. By delivering sessions in-person we were able to build relationships, keep students engaged with more interactive activities and better react to body language. It was noticeable when we had to deliver the final presentation back to the council’s management team online; it was more difficult to involve and engage the students.
9. Bigger isn’t always better
At one point during the planning of the project, our contact at the college talked about working with a class of 30 students. But in the end, we ran the project with six to eight students who signed up for this as a ‘super curricular’ activity. On the face of it, engaging 30 students sounds ideal. But the reality is something like this works so much better with a smaller group, just as it would for a traditional focus group. We were able to keep them all involved, got to know each other and it genuinely felt like we were a bit of a project team.
10. There are always things you’d do differently
We ran this project while the impact of the pandemic and restrictions were still being felt. It would have been great to involve the students in some fieldwork such as street interviews, for example. We would have also liked to deliver a presentation to the council’s management team in-person so the students could visit the council offices and be more involved in feeding back to managers.
Maybe next time….
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