Better qualitative research: call for evidence

Quality in Qual

How to assess, commission and generate good qualitative evaluation and evidence

Do you use qualitative research methods to evaluate the wellbeing impact of your work? Do you use qualitative evaluation data to make strategic or funding decisions?

We want to help organisations choose appropriate methods to qualitatively research and evaluate the impact of their interventions on wellbeing, ensuring      that the evaluation outputs generated can be trusted and regarded as high quality evidence, making an important contribution to the evidence base for use by practitioners, funders, policy makers and other decision makers.  We want to have a great answer to: How can I do great qualitative evaluation for my project?

What is happening?

We are working with two independent researchers, Jonathan Breckon and Ruth Puttick, to identify what guidelines, frameworks and resources currently exist and how they are used to guide the application and interpretation of qualitative evaluation research.

We want to draw upon these to identify gaps in provision, and create a new framework which helps organisations choose the right research methods to qualitatively research and evaluate the impact of their interventions on wellbeing for their context.

Criteria for submission

We want to know how you assess, commission and generate good qualitative evaluation & evidence, and any issues or barriers you face.

Specifically, we are looking for:

• Guidelines, frameworks, standards of evidence, or other resources, you use which help you to decide which qualitative evaluation methods to use, and/or how to assess their quality, when conducting impact evaluations.
• Examples of qualitative impact evaluations which you conducted or have used. These may be examples of best practice in wellbeing qualitative impact evaluations which others could emulate. Or these examples may provide useful lessons for how not to conduct a qualitative impact evaluation.
• Where are gaps in provision? What other guidelines or frameworks would help you to generate high quality qualitative evaluation? What else is needed to help you make sense of qualitative evaluation data?

Next steps

Please send your research, or the list of resources and guidance you use, by Monday 12 April 2021 to evidence@whatworkswellbeing.org with the subject header ‘Quality in Qualitative Evaluation’.

Thank you for your help.

We will email the findings to everyone who submits material when we publish them. If you don’t have evidence to submit, but would like to find out the results of the research, sign up to our email alert below.