Why set up Community Voice?

More Information...  Why set up Community Voice?

There a number of significant practical reasons for setting up a panel like Community Voice. The advantages include: 

• as people have agreed to take part, response rates are higher than for comparable one-off surveys. In particular they are likely to be a much better response rate to postal questionnaires, which otherwise can have the major drawback of poor response rates; 

• time is saved by not having to draw a new sample for each survey; 

• as some information about panel members is held, it is possible to identify quickly and easily a particular population group. For example, we could be approached to undertake a sample of what young adults think of the career advice they had while at school. This can be done if the panel and the sub groups are large enough to provide a sub sample of adequate size for analysis; 

• it is possible to identify quickly and easily people who have said they would take part in qualitative research such as focus groups, and know their characteristics such an age and employment status. In the past, much time and resources have been used when setting up focus groups; and 

• a panel is a research resource which can be shared between local organisations, helping to develop partnerships between them, particularly if they work together in responding to the findings. 

However, there are potential problems of using a panel approach including: 

• implementing a panel needs skill in research methods, especially sampling and questionnaire design, processing and interpretation. 

• if badly sampled, the findings will be unreliable. 

• even if the panel is structured to match known population characteristics, people will agree to join the panel may have an atypical level of motivation or interest in public sector organisation or local issues; 

• panellists will increasingly become informed about the workings of the partnership organisations; this may affect their answers. This is both a disadvantage from the perspective of wanting a sample typical of the general population, and an advantage from the perspective of developing 'citizenship;' 

• as panellists become increasingly well informed, using a panel is not the best method for tracking views or monitoring changes in satisfaction. It is not possible to tell whether views have changed because services have improved or because learning more about the public sector has given panellists an increasingly favourable view of our work; 

• the panel is unlikely large enough to include sufficient numbers of small minority groups or users of some services, to be able to analyse their views separately; 

• in common with other survey methods, the panel does not actively involve people in decision-making; and 

• there are considerable resource implications involved in setting up and maintaining a panel, whether the panel is run by in-house staff or by consultants. 

The Community Voice partners and NOP are well aware of these issues and our methods have ensured that the impact of these disadvantages has been minimised.

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