The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Self-effacing as we are we’re embarrassed to say that this week’s bulletin features not one but two shameless plugs on our own behalf. The Engagement Hub features our blog on understanding community cohesion, and the Values Lab explores further our work on widening participation.
Dragging our gaze away from our own navels, meanwhile, we explore social marketing approaches to domestic abuse. And of course, there’s the bazaar of the bizarre that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including key polling on who’d go to Harry and Meghan’s wedding.
It was announced towards the end of last month that a pilot scheme in Northern Ireland will look to tackle domestic violence using behaviour change techniques. The programme will use a new ‘therapeutic’ model, with 30 offenders participating at any given time.
This sounds like a really important scheme, and it will be interesting to see how it goes. Our own work on this issue, in Greenwich among other places, revealed that one significant challenge in addressing domestic abuse is about definitions. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges we found was that everyone opposed domestic violence – but according to a very narrow and extreme version of what it constituted (which of course didn’t include their own actions).
The Northern Ireland scheme is designed to “challenge individuals to truly confront their offending behaviour.” In this light, it seems like getting some of these basic, remedial understandings of domestic violence in place will be a key first step…
Cohesion and insight
TCC’s recent long read explores the question of cohesion, using data from our partners, Webber Phillips. Using a series of charts, such as the one below, it explores where the five pilot councils chosen for the government’s Integrated Communities sit in relation to level of/ change in the non-WB community.
It’s worth reading the article to really make sense of what this map and others mean. But the key thing is to understand how people respond to change – and the impact this has on cohesion and social capital and community resilience. Insight about changes happen and how neighbourhoods are likely to respond is key in developing engagement strategies that make sure change is inclusive.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Values and university
What can elite higher education institutions learn from new universities? We wrote about this recently, in collaboration with Karen Landles, as part of Exterion Media’s Universe City programme.
On the subject of universities, we thought we’d test the values of students and graduates. The findings below are based on our 2015 political polling in England and Wales. The numbers show whether the respective groups over- or under-index compared to the overall sample of 3,100.
There isn’t much of a surprise here, with full-time students much more likely to be Pioneers, and graduates quite a lot more likely. This seems to chime with the hypothesis, set out in the aforementioned blog, that universities are essentially Pioneer institutions – and need to do much better when it comes to reaching out to other values groups.
One interesting aspect to this is that the results are much more exaggerated amongst present students than among graduates. This may be an age factor – with graduates obviously including those that may have graduates a long time ago, and matured into Settlers. And it may also be to do with the definition of graduate – with those who qualify including those with part-time of technical qualifications which have degree status. But it’s nevertheless interesting.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of The Weekly which perennially sneaks into our bulletin through clearing:
Crack out your knitwear and enjoy these pictures of Sam Barsky, who has become an internet sensation by posing in front of landmarks in a handmade jumper.
Check out YouGov’s latest poll: would people attend the Royal Wedding if invited (the surprising thing for us was that youngsters were more likely than older people to say they’d go!)
