Collaborating, meandering and consolidating to identify research priorities on welfare advice and health

Posted by Natalie Forster, Senior Research Assistant and Monique Lhussier, Associate Professor in Public Health and Wellbeing, Northumbria University and Fuse

As the judges of the Man Booker prize for fiction whittle down their long list and decide on the shortlist of books in the running for best novel of the year, we’ve been making a few (more research focused) lists of our own.

Setting aside our individual research plans and ambitions to focus on welfare and health

Funded by the NIHR School for Public Health Research, we are currently working collaboratively (from across Fuse, University College London, The University of Sheffield, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) to set the future research agenda in the area of welfare advice and health. Working across this number of institutions, we have managed to set aside our individual research plans and ambitions and combine our expertise in a series of workshops to focus on the issues of welfare and health. Colleagues from the welfare advice sector have agreed to join us and are keeping the discussions grounded in the realities of practice, over the course of four workshops (this blog marks our half way point).

The first workshop saw us (tentatively at first) present our research to each other; with both our detailed topics and methodologies varying significantly, as one might expect. Deciding which research questions to pursue is a daunting task. Shortlisting questions was a delicate juggling act of managing our respective interests and expertise, while keeping practice perspective up front and centre, to ensure the usefulness of our future findings. This process also opened up fundamental discussions about the role of welfare advice in society, and how this should be studied.

One key area of debate concerns whether we should study the health impact of welfare advice, welfare itself, and/or systems of welfare provision in their broadest sense. At present, the UK boasts a welfare system that, in its complexity and inaccessibility, needs the intervention of advice services for users to access their entitlements. As researchers, should we therefore focus our attention on this hostile welfare environment, thought to perpetuate or deepen health inequalities, as opposed to advice services themselves? For example, a research emphasis on the health outcomes of advice might have been interesting but could play into wider failings to make benefits accessible if the advice-health relationship is proved any less than definitive. The group also considered whether advice services should be studied as an intervention or in terms of their function within society.

Further discussions centred around which outcomes, and particular user groups to focus on, and whether to study universal or means tested benefits, continuously swerving between the pragmatic and the theoretical, the national and the local. These fruitful meanderings were captured in a long list of possible research questions which we then worked to weigh up against agreed criteria. The result? A consolidated and (slightly!) shortened list of research questions, focused on five priority areas:

1. Are there inequalities in the impact and reach of advice services across social groups? How/ does advice delivery mode matter?
2. What are the individual and system level impacts of the de-implementation of advice services?
3. What are the impacts of changes to welfare provision on children, inter-generationally and throughout the life course? 
4. How do experiences of social welfare vary by social group, geographically and across generations? How do different identities combine to influence how social welfare is understood? 
5. What is the impact of the rise in precarious employment and low wages on advice seeking and provision?

So quite a research agenda to fulfil! Throughout the remainder of the project, we’ll be engaging with advice sector representatives and recipients of advice to hear their views on the directions research in the area should take before developing concrete plans for how we could actually carry out this research. After that it’s time to commit pen to paper and draft those grant applications!