Words by: James Frayne

Public First is changing its approach to political and policy research by introducing a new qualitative research product for clients.

After a year of trials in the UK, the US, and around the world – led by Ed Shackle – we are introducing our new “Immersive Research” product, which is now a standard product for clients investigating politically-relevant issues.

In the last year, Ed’s team have conducted Immersive Research on a range of issues, including: public attitudes towards public transportation policy in a large US city; attitudes to the building of large-scale infrastructure in rural areas; attitudes to the role of taxation and spending in politically-contested towns; and attitudes to “levelling-up” and civic pride in a small provincial city.

Immersive Research puts researchers on the ground for much longer periods of time than in standard political qualitative research. Typically, political qualitative research involves spending an evening in a particular area. Immersive Research puts researchers into locations for days, typically with focus groups held in the evenings between.

In Immersive projects, our data team crunches the numbers to determine the right location and target audience, ensuring we meet the right demographic balance to reflect the nature of the town in question. From this point, informal, semi-structured interviews take place on the street, in shops, in homes, in small businesses, in pubs and cafes, in supermarket car parks, and so on; wherever we hit our target audience in their most natural environments, we’ll head there.

This approach differs from traditional “clipboard” interviews. By meeting people in their natural environments – not just via high street intercepts – this research is more informal in tone by design; consequently interviews vary dramatically in length or style. The objective is to produce a feeling for what sentiment is in a given location overall.

The objectives of Immersive Research are the following:

• Reaching the mass of people – through informal conversation – who would never attend a focus group or fill in a poll – either because they have an aversion to politics (while still voting) or because their lives are such that they cannot spare time to engage in research.
• Countering an increasing challenge to all political research: the intense politicisation of a small minority of the population – people who are much more likely to engage in research, as well as join demonstrations, post on social media, write to their MPs, and so on (but not necessarily more likely to vote).
• Reducing the feeling of research as a “lab exercise” by conducting research in natural environments. Similarly, this research can somewhat reduce the feeling they’ll be judged for what they say, in a world where this is more common.
• Ensuring qualitative research is ever-more wide-reaching and questioning, by conducting detailed research in advance of the project starting, on demographics, social and economic conditions, and political considerations.

Since our formation in 2016, qualitative research has been a major feature of our research and will continue to be so.

We anticipate conducting more focus groups than ever in 2024; they remain a critical part of our approach to research as they provide the conditions for structured conversations that are uniquely useful for complex policy conversations. However, on some political issues, we find groups are especially useful when they accompany Immersive Research.

If you would like to hear more about our Immersive Research, please get in touch with Ed Shackle.