Consultation analysis

As a full-service market and social research agency, for many projects at DJS Research we are involved throughout the entire end-to-end research process; from survey/consultation design, through to data collection/fieldwork, analysis and reporting. However, we can also offer essential support on particular aspects of the research process, creating tailored, service-led solutions to fulfil specific business needs. We frequently collaborate with clients to provide analysis and reporting for surveys and open consultations that they themselves have conducted in-house.

Such client-led projects have typically involved online surveys, or open consultations, which have been set up and hosted on a client’s website and/or promoted via social media. However, the clients have identified that they do not have the in-house resources or capacity to process the data collected themselves (which may involve several thousand responses from the public and/or other stakeholders) or analyse and report upon the outcomes – this is where DJS Research comes in!

Despite our analysis and reporting only role in these projects, we are always happy to help advise on survey and questionnaire design to ensure the final outputs are accessible, engaging and meet the intended research objectives. Clients then take responsibility for setting up and hosting the online survey or public consultation. Data files containing the raw data collected from respondents are securely transferred to DJS Research via our commercial-grade secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) at regular intervals during fieldwork.

DJS Research then takes responsibility for the coding of any open-response/free-text questions (to code frames reviewed and agreed with the client), upon which our in-house team of specialist coders can conduct thematic sentiment analysis. We then process and collate all the coded data from the open text and closed questions into a set of cross-tabulations (to an agreed specification) with responses for each question shown at a ‘total’ level and by key demographic and survey variables. DJS Research will then use the cross tabulations to conduct the analysis of the survey or consultation responses and write the report.

Some recent examples of projects where we have worked closely with clients to conduct the analysis and reporting for their open public and/or stakeholder surveys or consultations include:

• South Cambridgeshire District Council: Four-day working week consultation

• Oxfordshire County Council: Public consultation of their Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS)