Understanding Communities: insights into the research process

Dr George Evans, Policy Adviser at the British Academy

This post is part of a series from the Understanding Communities programme of six research projects, supported by the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation.

The six Understanding Communities research projects, funded by the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation, aim to develop tangible, evidence-based policy solutions for enhancing people’s communities for the benefit of society. It is anticipated that the projects will help inform policy and practice on a range of issues relating to the nature of communities and their effects on people, including how communities can improve wellbeing across the UK.

Each project investigates a different policy question. These are: how nature can play a role in facilitating migrant integration into communities, whether administrative data already gathered by local authorities can provide insights into community wellbeing, how people from different localities — including diverse communities — access social welfare legal advice, the impacts of community asset acquisition on rural communities, the effectiveness of transformative justice in creating stronger connections between women with convictions and their communities, and how children’s perceptions, experiences and attitudes contribute towards community integration.

Such a diverse portfolio means that tying together the collective learnings, challenges and opportunities faced by the different projects is a difficult task, but one that can add crucial value to the development of the projects and the Understanding Communities programme in its entirety. Learning from the experience of other projects, sharing advice on overcoming challenges, and exploring how opportunities identified by some projects could be relevant to other teams will help allow the projects to develop as successfully as possible.

This is why the Nuffield Foundation commissioned the Institute for Community Studies to produce ‘Insights Reports’, to be published at various stages of the projects’ work. These reports will collect insights from the experience of the different projects and present them in an accessible format to allow for collective learning, internally among the different teams. The first report was produced in summer 2023 — this blog summarises and explores its key findings.

Wellbeing

The different Understanding Communities projects, and the programme as a whole, aim to explore concepts that relate to the nature of communities and their effects on people. This includes a consideration of the role of wellbeing, which formed a key focus of this first Insights report.

The projects generally distinguished between community and individual wellbeing. Community wellbeing can be seen either as simply the aggregation of individual wellbeing within a particular community, or as implying something more than the sum of its individual parts. Moreover, community wellbeing can also be a source of individual wellbeing.

Within the broad emphasis on wellbeing, three interrelated concepts stood out. The concept of ‘cohesion’ was strongly evident in the projects’ work so far and three of the six projects referred to cohesion in their original proposal setting out the scope of their intended work. If the concept occurs frequently, it is also used in different senses. Some projects, for example, used cohesion to refer to feelings of belonging. Others used cohesion to refer to the potential for mutual support in a crisis.

‘Integration’ is another significant concept, one that was emphasised by two teams in particular. Both see integration as an important and desirable policy outcome, closely related to wellbeing. Integration in this sense refers to a ‘coming together’ of different groups within a community through mutual adaptation.

‘Resilience’ was also important. This concept can be understood as separate from, but contributing to, wellbeing — and something that is a desirable outcome of policy interventions. It can also be seen as supporting community wellbeing by enabling communities to better respond to harm, be they external harms such as economic shocks, or internal ones such as prejudice or unequal power relations.

Challenges

What challenges were identified by the Insights Report? Issues around the use of evidence were recognised as a significant challenge. What is understood as an acceptable standard of evidence is partly shaped by those in positions of power, and this may be to the disadvantage of non-academic or non-institutional actors. Working with a community can also lead to the suggestion that research is ‘biased’ towards the perspective(s) of the community.

Embeddedness was another key challenge identified. Participatory approaches to policymaking are sometimes criticised for being ad hoc and one off. If participatory approaches are to have a lasting impact, it is important that they are not temporary and survive beyond the duration of a project’s funding.

A variety of issues around representation emerged from the Insights Report. Some community members, for example, experience barriers when it comes to participating in research — this may lead to biases in the research, or the underrepresentation of particular perspectives found within a community. Overcoming these barriers is itself a significant issue for the projects, not least because it places additional burdens on researchers.

Likewise, challenges associated with ethics and power were a consistent theme. Researchers are obliged to represent the voices of communities as authentically as possible. Yet this is complicated by the varying priorities and perspectives of different stakeholders, who may hold a range of views on the same question. It is also important to appreciate that research has the potential to cause conflict or differences of opinion within communities. Some community members may even be at risk due to their participation in the research.

Opportunities

The type of community-based research the projects are undertaking provides significant opportunities for engagement, which involves allowing community members to play a role in influencing policy relating to the issues that affect their lives. To maximise opportunities for community engagement, projects can work with local partners to involve as wide a range of participants in the research as possible.

There is a major opportunity for the projects to bring lived experience into policymaking. Individuals with lived experience within communities are closest to a particular societal problem and thus can contribute their specialised knowledge and insights to the research. But policymakers are also increasingly interested in accessing evidence that reflects the views of communities who are directly impacted by particular policies.

There are indeed a wide range of research and policy-related opportunities that are already emerging from the projects’ collective work. Co-creating outputs with policymakers can help increase the buy-in of policymakers to the findings of the projects. This may be especially useful for bringing more qualitative evidence into policymaking.

Community-orientated research can also add to community value. Direct benefits for communities may arise from field work. These include the generation of funding for the community, with one project, for example, already having directly generated funding as a result of its work. The research projects can provide opportunities for knowledge exchange between different groups within communities. This is where relationships are crucial — community-orientated research can break down ‘silos’ between groups and introduce opportunities to build networks between participants.

Looking forward

The Insights Report provides a map of where the different projects are at in their development. It is designed to help the projects reflect on the points of connection, and points of difference, between their own work and the work going on elsewhere in the Understanding Communities programme. Sharing problems, solutions and opportunities will allow for the projects to capitalise on the learning of different teams. This should maximise the impact of the programme generally, as the projects move forward to the next stage of their work.