In May I had the opportunity to visit Notley High School to take part in Essex County Council’s career insight day. Being part of this day was very important to me as I remember being a Year 8 myself and knowing little to nothing about the possibilities of ever working in data or research.
Essex County Council, in collaboration with health partners, has a duty to undertake an assessment of the current and future health and wellbeing needs of the county’s communities on a regular basis. This process is referred to as the Joint …
Three intrepid researchers deliver ECC’s first in-house digital ethnography. It’s been a daring adventure and a leap of faith for us to combine an online tool (Incling) with research skills, for a project about mental health support.
Over the last year or so our team has carried out research around Covid-19, mental health, financial struggles, women’s safety and domestic abuse among other things. This has involved participants discussing past traumas and difficult periods they have experienced, which can leave us as researchers often dwelling on those conversations long after they have taken place...
I know many of us might be experiencing ‘webinar fatigue’ right now with flurries of invites to attend some webinar/show and tell/budget TedTalk or the like, and we think “am I really interested enough to give up my time for this?” But I wanted to share a bit about how our experience of co-hosting a webinar really paid off!
When the coronavirus epidemic began to take hold in the UK, things started escalating pretty quickly. Once life as we know it started changing around us, we realised we were going to have to sort out our priorities, and fast.
Futures Academy has allowed a cohort of people to explore and undertake alternative methods of working instead of traditional ‘go to’, ‘same old’ project team activities.
Last week some of the team went up to Birmingham for the LARIA Research Impact Awards and conference, and came away with three 'highly commended' awards for the Research and Data teams.
Broadly speaking, evaluation is measuring the worth or value of something. This could be a programme of work, policy or service. There is no ‘magic formula’ to evaluation. We all make daily judgements about the worth or value of something; only evaluation requires greater critical thinking and a structured approach.
Many of us will be familiar with the core elements of ethics within data and research, but we need to go one step further and ask ourselves: why are we gathering the data? What purpose will it serve and what impact will it have? To avoid gathering insight in a tokenistic way, we need to be clear about the reasons behind why we are doing it.