‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view
– until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.’ Atticus Finch
Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird
We are an independent and not for profit, research agency, specialising in public health and tackling social inequality. We bring expertise in social research, policy analysis and social marketing. We aim to support and champion the delivery of social impact and to help ordinary people have greater control over the decisions that affect them.
We work exclusively with public and third sector organisations – as well as service users and communities – to ensure that services are designed and implemented efficiently, effectively and in the public interest.
Focus on equality and diversity
Our expertise in inclusion, diversity and equality is unparalleled. We design the most effective and inclusive approaches possible for our clients. Our work in this area spans most aspects of social or public policy: health, welfare, media, employment, crime and policing, among others.
We design both survey and qualitative samples to ensure the voices of those who are ‘hard to research’ are heard.
Where We Work
✓ Health and Social Care
✓ Local Government
✓ Voluntary and Community Sector
✓ Environment
CONSULTATION AND ENGAGEMENT
We conduct highly effective consultation forums – in the ‘real world’ and online – to empower people to participate in decision-making for the public good. These consultation forums deliver value for money and make public organisations more responsive, innovative, effective and accountable.
We co-create consultations that involve topic specialists, professionals, people with personal experience of a given subject and members of the general.
We design and deliver engagement events involving the public and professionals. We work closely with clients to tailor events to ensure consultations are both productive and enjoyable. We regularly receive praise from participants and clients for the level of detail in planning, which leads to events where people feel they have been nourished by the process.
We use a range of methods and techniques to engage with audiences. We have pioneered the use of techniques such as Journey Mapping, Citizens Juries, Market Stalls, Question Time, Hypotheticals, Design-an-Advertising Campaign and many more approaches, to ensure that our deliberative dialogue approaches are both fun and engaging. We engage with people as citizens, customers, patients, service users and stakeholders.
Our work opens up insights into their attitudes, experiences and expectations, and highlights the drivers and values that inform these. We then use these as a basis for useful, evidence-based recommendations to contribute to local and national policy debates and influence the shape and delivery of service
EVALUATION AND IMPACT
We are experts in the evaluation of complex social interventions.
We specialise in evaluation research. With reduced funding, there is an ever greater need to deliver better and more cost-effective services. Yet less than 1% of public expenditure is spent on interventions for which there is a clear evidence base. Comprehensive evaluations are vital in order to learn lessons and embed them in planning.
We combine outstanding research skills, sensitivity and policy awareness to ensure that stakeholders remain engaged. Our evaluations are both formative and summative, and focus on processes as well as outcomes. We develop an explicit ‘theory of change’ which sets out the expected impacts and outcomes of a programme, and how these will be achieved.
Experimentation in public policy
We champion the commitment to experimentation in public policy. A key function of evaluation research should be to test a new intervention to determine whether it is more effective than existing practice. We have pioneered the use of experimental research designs to evaluate public health mass media campaigns, and targeted interventions in prisons, schools, primary care services and a host of other community settings.
ABOUT US
Adam Crosier
Director
adam.crosier@womresearch.org.uk
Adam Crosier BA MSc is co-founder and director of WOM. He previously worked with a range of disability charities as an expert adviser on research. He developed the use of customer journey mapping as an advocacy tool for disabled people, and helped Age UK develop strategies to re-orient services to support the cares of people living with dementia. In the 1990s he led research programmes that informed and evaluated the UK’s HIV/AIDS and sexual health public communication campaigns. He developed innovative research practices to understanding the needs and experiences of a range of ‘hard to research’ groups including injecting drug users, men who have sex with men and sex workers. Adam has a strong interest in tobacco control and led the research programme of the Big Smoke Debate that was influential in bringing about smokefree legislation in the UK.
Adam served as an expert adviser to the Healthcare Commission on tobacco control policy, and to the Food Standards Agency’s investigation into the marketing of Follow On milk.
Dominic McVey
Director
dom@womresearch.org.uk
Dominic McVey BSc MA has extensive experience of developing, leading and managing public health research projects, social marketing programmes and health communication strategies at national, regional and local level. As Director of Research for the Health Education Authority, the Multiple Sclerosis Society and the National Social Marketing Centre he initiated and managed programmes of research on health interventions; social capital and social exclusion; life course segmentations; large scale health and lifestyle surveys including surveys of ethnic minority populations and managed the development and evaluation of numerous complex public health intervention including the national HIV/AIDS campaigns and national Anti-Smoking campaigns. He has also conducted qualitative insight work with many marginalised groups in society working across a range of settings including prisons, street outreach with homeless people and Roma communities. He has also instigated pan-European research projects and advised the EU and the WHO.
Dominic has published many research reports and written academic papers on research methods and programme evaluation, serves on several advisory groups and is an Associate Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
CLIENTS
