Blog by Dakota Langhals, RSS Policy Researcher
Last month, we were pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded funding from Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) Insight Infrastructure programme for research into poverty-related data gaps in the UK. This is an exciting chance to contribute to the Insight Infrastructure portfolio, which seeks to help researchers and civil society make sense of poverty.
I’m thrilled to partner with the Centre for Public Data (CfPD) for this project, who have done excellent work on data gaps in other parts of the UK statistical system.
Through this new project on poverty data gaps, we’re hoping to focus attention on issues of serious importance to society. Over the nine-month project timeline, we’ll publish a series of blogs reflecting on progress to date. Here, I’ll discuss our initial work, our plans, and how you can get involved.
Initial Stages
We’ve spent the last few weeks setting up a project plan and diving into the first round of desk research. So far, we’ve collated a few hundred poverty-related outputs from major third-sector organisations and academic sources published since 2020. Not all of them deal directly with data gaps, but they all illustrate the research interests of groups outside of government. (We’ll share our collated list at a later stage.)
In the coming weeks, we’ll look at government sources, too. Thankfully, CfPD developed a clever methodology for that task in earlier work on data gaps in the UK justice system. I’m optimistic that – with some adaptation – it will turn up useful results.
Next Steps
We’ll look more deeply at the collated outputs to identify:
- Questions people are asking (or not)
- Questions that can’t be answered adequately
- Data sources they are using (or not)
- Key themes
- Data gaps that frustrate the outputs, and the causes of those gaps
There is some interesting work being done elsewhere that includes the development of a taxonomy for data gaps. We’ll be looking to develop our own taxonomy that fits more naturally into the poverty space, which we’ll use to map outputs to specific gaps. We’ll also aim to get a sense of the importance of each gap by the amount of research interest orbiting it.
Meanwhile, we’ll be running user engagement events over the next few months to ensure that we’re accurately capturing the views and experiences of researchers, professionals, and people with lived experience of poverty. That will include interviews after the conclusion of the first phases of desk research as well as themed roundtables with invited stakeholders.
The first roundtable will be on Monday, July 28th from 1:00 to 3:00 PM. It will zoom in on gender / gendered issues and poverty, focusing on how these intersect with gaps in UK data sources. If you’d be interested in participating, look on our website.
We also want to hear about other topics you think we should cover in future roundtables. You can fill out this form to give your input.
Watch this space for future updates, or email policy@rss.org.uk to be added to a low-traffic mailing list for this research.