Approach - Winter 2018
Welcome to this winter’s edition of our Ipsos Scotland newsletter. It was a real pleasure to see many of you at the Future of Research event we held at the awe-inspiring Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh earlier in the year. Continuing that theme of innovation, this newsletter takes you through some of the latest developments in research and – most importantly – how they can help us understand how best to address some of the thorny policy issues that Scotland faces.
In a context of declining response rates, how can large-scale population surveys adapt - while still delivering the high quality data that’s essential for National Statistics? Push-to-web methodologies are one way of doing this, which we’ve been trialling at Ipsos with our partners in ONS and elsewhere. Chris Martin (@_Chris_D_Martin) and Patten Smith take us through when to use push-to-web surveys, and how to minimise survey error as much as possible when you do.
Much public policy requires changing people’s behaviours – from measures aimed at encouraging people to eat more healthily, donate blood or get vaccinated, to increasing the proportion of journeys made by public transport, through to increasing levels of volunteering. But how can we best combine behavioural science and research to deliver insights that inform policy and strategy? Sara Davidson (@SaraMORIScot) and Colin Strong (@colinstrong) cover Ipsos’s approach to behaviour change and the steps involved in identifying, developing and assessing the effectiveness of potential behaviour change interventions.
The last – but certainly not the least – innovation we cover here is text analytics. We are drowning in data – as Rachel Ormston (@rachelormston) and colleagues highlight, the volume of data we’re generating has increased at an astonishing rate. Text analytics is one way in which we can make sense of huge volumes of unstructured data – Rachel shares some examples of how we’ve been applying this method to make sense of social research problems, and looks at how it could develop in future.
I hope you enjoy reading this edition of Approach – if you would like to discuss anything that’s mentioned (or not mentioned!) here, please get in touch. Have a very merry Christmas, and a happy Hogmanay.
Emily Gray
Managing Director,
Ipsos Scotland
@Emily_IpsosMORI
