Choosing your methods
Skip to
Finding out what the community thinks
Engaging the community to learn what they think is one of the most common forms of community participation. There are a wide variety of activities that enable stakeholders to answer questions, give their opinions or make suggestions. These include consultation - though not all engagement activities that seek to gain community insight are consultation.
Representative or open?
If you want your research results to be representative of the population, then you'll need to engage a statistically representative sample of people. This means the people you engage must broadly mirror the proportions of the population. Depending on the size of the area you are researching, this means you will usually need to reach a large number of people. You may need to target some communities more than others or weighting the results to address imbalances. Therefore it's advisable to commission a specialist research company to do this.
Council staff could also use the Barnet Citizens' Panel. This is a statistically representative group of residents who have been recruited to take part in research and other participatory projects.
Often, it isn’t necessary to have representative results. For example, you may only be interested in hearing from certain specific communities. Consultations are legally required to be open to everyone not just targeted groups.
Questionnaires
Questionnaires are the most used method for gathering insight from communities. They can be done online or face to face, but in either case the design of the questionnaire is vital to getting the information you need.
Here are some tips for writing an effective questionnaire:
-
Use simple language: Always aim to be as accessible as possible, so avoid jargon and technical terms.
-
Use the ‘so what?’ test: Challenge each of your questions by asking – ‘so what?’ A question might be interesting to ask, but what will you do with the information it provides?
-
Use the right type of question: Consider if a multiple-choice list, a rating scale, or an open text box are the best structure for your question. Think about the data you want to capture and how you will analyse the results.
-
Include ‘don’t know’ and ‘prefer not to say’ options: Sometimes no answer is the only response someone is able to give, so don’t force people to make a choice that doesn’t represent their view.
-
Collect demographic information: We ask people to provide information such as gender, ethnicity and age so that we can measure how successful we have been in reaching a balanced sample of the community. It also enables the results from different communities to be compared. The Consultation and Engagement team can provide a set of standard demographic questions to add to our questionnaire.
At Barnet Council we use Microsoft Forms to create our online surveys. For guidance on how to create, share and analyse a Forms survey contact the Consultation and Engagement team.
Focus groups
While questionnaires can be useful for collecting quantitative information (generally more numerical or statistical data), a live discussion can help to explore a topic in more depth. Focus groups give richer insight into people’s attitudes, behaviours and motives. They involve fewer people than surveys, so cannot provide statistically reliable results, but can be used alongside other methods to dig deeper into certain questions.
There is a skill to facilitating focus groups effectively, so you may want to commission a trained facilitator. Sometimes having someone independent of your organisation running the session can encourage people to speak more honestly.
Traditionally, focus groups are held in person but they can be held online too.
Other qualitative methods
There are many different ways you can involve the community in order to gain qualitative insight. Here are some examples:
Ethnographic approaches look at the lived experiences of groups of people. This is always done in person at the locations where the subjects live, work or study. The research is a mixture of observation and in-depth interviews and is best carried out by specialist research organisations.
Read about two recent ethnographic studies in Barnet:
Barnet Disability Study 2023 by Habitus
Understanding Community Spaces and Places in East Barnet by Neighbourly Lab
These are a type of deliberative engagement, which is where a relatively small group of people come together to work on a topic in-depth and reach a consensus. The assembly members are supported by professional facilitators and subject matter experts who provide information to support their decision making. Citizens’ assemblies (and citizens’ juries) are useful for tackling big cross-cutting issues, such as climate change.
Read about Barnet Council’s Citizens' Assembly on Climate Change and Biodiversity.
Coproduction and community leadership
Involving the community to hear their thoughts and opinions is just one way of doing community participation. Communities are often best placed to lead changes as well as comment on them. They bring valuable skills, strengths and local knowledge. It's part of the council's role to make sure that residents and other local stakeholders who have valuable skills and strengths are supported to use them as much as possible to benefit the borough.
Communities can take the lead by:
- setting the agenda for change – identifying the priorities that most matter to them
- being directly involved in decisions that will affect their lives – such as when services are open or how their town centre will be regenerated
- taking the lead on practical action – such as by running a community event or taking on ownership of a local building
- having direct influence or control over resources – either working alongside the council and other statutory bodies or having delegated authority over certain spending decisions.
Giving communities more power can lead to better, more efficient solutions to local challenges. But this can mean changing the way you usually work. You may need to relinquish a degree of control and be more comfortable with uncertainty. You may also need to build support for your proposed approach internally, encouraging others to understand why you are pursuing a community powered approach and the benefits it will bring.
Check out these case studies from community-led projects in Barnet:
Tools and resources
Quick access menu
❯ Getting started: research and readiness
❯ Planning your community participation
☐ Choosing your methods
Contact us
Getting it right
Whatever method you choose to engage the community on your project, the way you do can make all the difference. Here are five things to think about:
- Planning: Start thinking about how you’ll communicate with communities from the beginning and keep checking in as the project develops. Build in regular updates for both your internal team and the community.
- Audience-focused: Much of your work will include information and language which isn’t familiar to communities. To make participation meaningful your work must be easy to understand. Use accessible, jargon-free language. Also remember, communities may need time and support to understand key information or ideas.
- Listening: Although communities might need time and support to understand key information or ideas, they also have knowledge and views you might not have. When you are thinking about your communications plan, consider what your key opportunities are to listen to and implement what you are hearing.
- Honesty: Sometimes things go wrong, plans change, or fixed parameters make an idea impossible. In these situations, it’s essential to be honest with communities. It might be difficult at first but will allow you to build greater trust for the long-term.
- Staying in touch: It’s important to ask communities how they want updates and then make sure you stick to your promises. You should also give them a clear contact point for who to ask if they have questions. If there are delays to a project outside of your control, let participants know when they can next expect to hear from you.