Ipsos Public Affairs on the importance of understanding society

So, Daniel can you tell us why it's important that a company like Ipsos invests in understanding society and the value that brings?
Well, primarily because we live in a society. And while we all might call Australia home, citizens experience this country in many different ways. We all have different values and expectations, prejudices and biases, fears and hopes and so on. When you combine these human factors with external influences such as the Asian region’s increasing political, social and economic influence, a digital age, Australia’s rapid population growth and urbanisation, and so on the net result is that Australia’s a pretty interesting, pretty diverse and pretty dynamic place.
As a full service research agency we must continue understand Australia if we are going to provide our clients with sensible insight and advice. To deliver on this, we invest considerable time and resource to monitor Australians’ concerns, values and their lived-experience. Two studies – designed and owned by Ipsos – contribute to this understanding. They are the Ipsos Issues Monitor and the Ipsos Life in Australia Report.

Tell us more about the Ipsos Issues Monitor?
The Ipsos Issues Monitor is Australia’s longest running and most credible ongoing study of community concerns. Each month we ask 1,000 Australians to tell us the top three issues facing Australia, their state or territory and their local area. We publish the national and state based concerns every quarter. And, while the reports focus on the top five concerns at a given point in time, they also show the evolution of concern over-time, relate those concerns to federal and state political cycles and highlight how capable Australians believe major political parties are at managing each concern.
We started the Issues Monitor almost a decade ago and, as such, we’re increasingly able to combine the survey data with and derive meaning from empirical data. For example, we can compare attitudes to unemployment with the actual unemployment rate, concerns about housing and cost of living with the RBA cash rate, worries about the economy with gross domestic and state product, among many others. The value we can derive from these combinations only increases over-time.
Our clients – who often work in areas sensitive to the relationship between attitudes and actual economic and social conditions – find these combinations invaluable when making policy, product, service and brand decisions.

In 2014 you started another study, the Ipsos Life in Australia Report. Can you tell us a bit that one?
Sure, the Ipsos Life in Australia Report is the nation’s largest study of community values and liveability. Collected and reported annually since 2014, Life in Australia not only provides Ipsos and our clients with a deep understanding of what citizens believe makes somewhere a good place to live, it also provides us with an insight into how Australians rate their local areas performance against a host of attributes, how liveable these local areas are compared to one and other at a point-in-time, and whether local areas are becoming more or less liveable over-time. 
Our approach to measuring liveability is truly citizen centric which, believe it or not, is actually quite unique. Where we derive an understanding of liveability by asking thousands of Australians what they believe makes somewhere a good place to live and how well their local area performs on those attributes, others take a top-down approach, deriving liveability by looking at mostly hard-economic factors – abstract concepts to most people. Both have their place, but we believe you can only truly understand what makes somewhere liveable by asking the citizens themselves about their values and experiences. 

So what’s next?
There’s no questioning our commitment to the Issues Monitor and Life in Australia studies in the long-term. The Issues Monitor has been running every month for almost a decade and Life in Australia is turning five this year. So while we’re super excited about maintaining what we’ve already got, we’re super super excited about our ever-increasing capability to connect the concerns, values and lived-experiences we collect from the survey data with actual events and other empirical data-sets.
For example, in recent years we’ve seen Millennials and Gen Xers become more likely to cite “housing/price of housing” as one their top concerns in the Issues Monitor and less likely to rate their local area highly with regard to the provision of “affordable decent housing” through the Life in Australia study. Our ability to connect the evolution of this increasing concern and worsening experience with external factors such as the reserve bank cash-rate, median house prices, population growth and a seemingly infinite host of lovely data-sets at quite granular levels not only allows us to look in the rear-view as to what has happened, why it occurred and its impact on citizens, it gives us the scope to look up-the-road to forecast where concerns and experience could end-up, under certain social and economic scenarios. 
This ability to genuinely connect the attitude and the actual to derive meaning for our clients is the future of our business, and we’re really excited to be offering these services to greater depths, more often for our clients.

So how can clients connect with these reports, and make sense of them for their organisations?
Both reports are published – in infographic form – on our website. The Issues Monitor can be found here, and Life in Australia can be found here. We’re always keen to talk more about these reports, so feel free to reach out if interested.

About Daniel Evans
Daniel Evans is the Deputy Managing Director at Ipsos Public Affairs. Interested in citizens, turning data into information and working with clients to affect positive change, Daniel is a career social researcher with strong commercial acumen and proven entrepreneurial capabilities. 
An accomplished writer, presenter and confident host, Daniel created and continues to author two of Australia's most comprehensive studies into community concern, values and the lived-experience – the Ipsos Issues Monitor, and the Ipsos Life in Australia report.