Examples

We’re always really happy to talk about work we’ve done in the past and how it made a difference, but to give you a little flavour of what we do and how we do it, here are some examples.

Childhood Wellbeing

UNICEF produced a report in early 2007 entitled “An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries”. Media coverage of the report was extensive, and identified the UK as the “bottom of a league table for child well-being across 21 industrialised countries”

Government wished to explore the basis on which ‘wellbeing’ was measured and commissioned us to explore what ‘childhood wellbeing’ meant to families, how best to describe the state implied by wellbeing, and to identify what they felt were the important factors in ‘wellbeing’.

We put together a programme of research built around the need to spark a discussion without using our own, loaded, language and concepts. The research discussions were very open, and were initially prompted by visual stimulus.  The researchers used only language already used by participants, and followed them as they explored their feelings, questioned their assumptions, interrogated one another about differences in perceptions and feelings, and built up a picture of what ‘childhood wellbeing’ was and should be.

Click to download the full report, and you can see the extensive coverage it received in the media by Googling ‘Counterpoint childhood wellbeing report’.

Sutton Centre for the Voluntary Sector

  • Research was required to inform how the sector and Borough could best support care users over the period where the commissioning process was changing dramatically;
  • Participants were vulnerable citizens undergoing a period of what was for many, rapid and confusing change;
  • We established a very close relationship with service providers within the Borough and with the network of voluntary services;
  • Level of frankness was considerably heightened with methodologies which allowed anonymity (e.g. telephone depth interviews) as it allowed service users to express worries and confusion which they found hard to admit to in face to face interviews

The final report can be downloaded via the link below.

http://www.suttoncvs.org.uk/index.php

Children (and young people’s) Workforce Development Council

  • Cross departmental project involving children, young people, professionals and stakeholders who support families – aim was to try to identify and disseminate best practice in partnership working;
  • Approach involved online discussion forums with stakeholders (Leaders within their organisations), group discussions with professionals, and groups with children and young people;
  • The challenge was to engage participants with the idea of partnership working : the concept was completely taken for granted by most children and young people, yet was an incredibly sensitive idea across the range of stakeholders and professionals interviewed;
  • Pre-tasks and co-creation were used to try to identify and deal with barriers to the idea of partnership working prior to group exercises; individual telephone depth interviews helped diagnose reasons behind the raising of barriers, and routes to credibly removing them.
  • The findings were used to feed into practice at all levels, and to help communicate the role of the CWDC to its target audience.