Should government promote ‘Optimism’ and ‘Resilience’ rather than ‘Happiness’?

We have previously blogged about the latest consultation and discussion paper by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) on the development of a National Well-being Index. This closes today (23 January) for those who are interested in contributing their view based on the material now available.

Having commented on the first consultation, TCC have now submitted the following comments to the latest consultation:

TCC Submission to Office for National Statistics (ONS) consultation on the development of a Well-Being Index - extract

Section A: Proposed domains

1.    Do you think the proposed domains present a complete picture of well-being? If not, what would you do differently?

Two elements seem to missing: measurement of optimism versus pessimism and also measurement of motivation and self-efficacy. Without those elements the well-being index is useful for academic research, but not as useful for policy interventions.

2.    Do you think the scope of each of the proposed domains is correct? If not, please give details.    

The scope of each domain is broadly right as it covers, personal, social and structural & design factors that behaviour change theory deems essential for effective policy interventions.

3.    Are there any areas where proposed domains should be merged or divided further? If yes, please give details. 

Our relationships is an area that could also cover a recognition of what social networks we inhabit. Good relationships benefit from strong social networks. Christakis and Fowler set this out in their book Connected.

Whilst most people have good social networks, the research seems to indicate that a minority are likely to in effect have ‘toxic’ ones from a health and well-being perspective. It is therefore disappointing that your three domains do not make reference to this. There are now translatable interventions that can map and address social networks that are being pioneered by the RSA and collaborators in their Connected Communities Project.

4.    Are the names chosen for the proposed domains easy to understand? If not, please give details.    

The names perhaps underplay the ‘social’ elements of well-being that I describe in earlier answers.

5.    Do you think that the proposed domains adequately reflect the responses to the national debate?    

Yes / No / Don’t Know

Section B: Proposed Measures

6.    Should any of the measures be removed? If yes, please give details.    

Not specifically. The number of indicators should not be restricted by an arbitrary limit. The measurement of that should in the end be usefulness to public policy. However see answer to Question 7.

7.    Are there any measures which should be added? If yes, please give details. If an alternative measure is suggested, which measure might be removed, to keep the total number the same?   

In terms of additions within the Individual Well-being domain:

a) A measure of optimism

b) Measures of motivation

The current recession and the decline in economic opportunities is having an impact on people’s optimism. For those with low optimism, levels of motivation may also decline.

If the National Well-being Indicators are to be useful in terms of identifying the factors that can contribute to public policy in getting the UK out a prolonged stagnating recession over the next decade, measurement of optimism is arguably important to track against economic indicators to see whether confidence is returning to the economy in order for more people to take entrepreneurial risk to create the jobs and sustainable growth needed in the coming years.

Optimism and the motivation to act on it is also important from a public health perspective. Even if a better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than non-optimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under 60 were more likely to die within eight months than non-pessimistic patients of the same initial health, status and age.

More on this agenda is addressed in Tali Sharot’s book, The Optimism Bias.

The big opportunity for those working in public policy is therefore not to promote the objective of ‘happiness’, which in every person, will always be impacted by personal challenges such as divorce, redundancy and death through the life cycle, but instead to utilise the measurements referred to above to promote ways to achieve more ‘optimism’ (and thus motivation) in people as an alternative approach to creating fleeting moments of ‘happiness’. That is what these indicators would really help us working in this field with.

If one did need to remove items to make way for the suggested items above, the following are suggested:

a) Long hours. The survey assumes this is a bad thing for well-being, however for some people this is a motivator.

b) Crime per capita. This is an external challenge which differently affects people. Indeed fear of crime (which is definitely worth keeping) does not always correlate with crime itself and often is higher in low crime areas.

However the number of indicators should not be restricted by an arbitrary limit. The measurement of that should in the end be usefulness to public policy.

8.    Are there any variants on the measures suggested which would be more appropriate? If yes, please give details.

Values based segmentation as academic recorded across many countries in the World Values Survey (WVS). This is a global research project that explores people’s values and beliefs, how they change over time and what social and political impact they have. It is carried out by a worldwide network of social scientists led by Shalom Schwarz and Ronald Inglehart, who, since 1981, have conducted representative national surveys in almost 100 countries. The WVS is the only source of empirical data on attitudes covering a majority of the world’s population (nearly 90%) and thus the National Well-being Index would then contribute to that.

Most significantly the WVS records, as part of it survey, questions on optimism and motivation in view of the impact they have on values that people then hold. UK-based data, dating back nearly 40 years, which is readily available, could be used to record the two elements I refer to in answer to Question 7.

9.    If only one or two measures should be used (for each domain), which ones should be chosen?   

The number of indicators should not be restricted by an arbitrary limit. The measurement of that should in the end be usefulness to public policy.

10.     Is the number of measures about right? Please give details.    

No, because the number of indicators should not be restricted by an arbitrary limit. The measurement of that should in the end be usefulness to public policy.

11.     Is the balance between objective and subjective measures about right? Please give details.  

It is clear we need a mix of these. Subjective measures may well pick up ‘weak signals’ of a change long before the subjective measures record them.

One of the key points we make is to question one of the underlying assumptions of the National Well-being Index: that the government should be promoting ‘happiness’ as a policy objective. Apart from happiness being such a personal thing, the average human life-cycle faces many challenges from death of parents, to exam failure to redundancy to divorce or relationship break-up, that it is difficult to see it as an effective objective. In our previous blog posting we said:

Understanding and measuring well-being is an issue rising up the public policy agenda, with movements such as Action for Happiness launched recently to promote the ideas around Happiness Economics put forward by Richard Layard. There are also other more holistic approaches promoted by those advocating Positive Psychology such as Martin Seligman’s Flourish. These recognise the need, at the same time as promoting happiness, to strengthen the resilience and “grit” of individuals to deal with the inevitable bad things in life; eg death of a loved one, divorce, even moving house, that promoting “happiness ” in general is unlikely to eliminate, but which also make us measure and appreciate the actual happy moments in life more. This approach also applies to building resilience in communities, where the state clearly has a role and responsibility to assist people. However as we argue in our submission, this support has often been narrowly interpreted in the past, which is why broader approaches need to be considered in future.

As we point out in our submission above, qualities such as optimism are much more relevant to public policy, than securing more ‘happiness’ as greater optimism combined with motivation empowers people to find their own happiness on their own terms.

From values research it is noticeable that the number of the most optimistic values set, the Outer Directed Prospectors has declined from 45% of the population in 2004 to 22% in 2011, whilst the least optimistic values set; security and safety driven Settlers; has doubled from 21% to 42% of the UK population,  Much of this may stem from the decline in personal economic optimism as a result of the recession, but may also reflect a more general fear of the rapidity of globalised and technological change. The table below shows this values shift:

Table 1: UK Values Changes 2004-2011

	2004	2005	2006	2008	2011	2011
Pioneer	34	36	42	40	39	36
Prospect	45	42	33	29	24	22
Settler	21	22	25	30	37	42

Optimism enables us to address times of unhappiness. A pessimistic person who is unhappy may find it harder to motivate themselves to improve their situation than an optimistic person in similar circumstances. Dr Tali Sharot at University College London has written The Optimism Bias on this subject. Extracts were recently published in the Observer.

If optimism is currently in short supply, the base from which people can become more optimistic is through being more resilient in hard times. TCC are currently working on projects mapping community resilience and examining potential interventions in less well-off areas impacted by the recession. Today, for example, we received data (Table 2 below) on three areas in a locality which has gone through substantial change with large numbers of new migrants to the locality, who do have high levels of optimism as a result of moving to a new area to seek their fortune. This average of 47% of outer-directed Prospectors across the 3 areas is more than double the national average for that values group shown in Table 1 above.

Table 2: Values data for Resilience project

	Settler	Prospector	Pioneer
Area A	31%	54%	15%
Area B	27%	48%	25%
Area C	23%	40%	37%
Total	27%	47%	26%

However as can be seen there may well be higher levels of pessimism amongst other people who may have very little contact with and hold different values to those newcomers who are broadly optimistic.

The next stage will be creating local interventions with the right communication and appropriate messengers that bring together people with more optimistic values with those who hold pessimistic values to create a broadly more optimistic social norm in communities that need it the most. We will report more on this research in due course.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

The Campaign Company is Ten Years Old

Christmas is often a time to review the preceding year. For us this is a particularly important point to review things. Ten years ago The Campaign Company (TCC) was established by its co-founders Jonathan Upton and David Evans with the initial aim to ‘make democracy work’. This followed a General Election where electoral turnout had just dropped substantially from 71.3% to 59.4 and there were increasing concerns about the rise of a ‘democratic deficit‘. As a result of that initial focus TCC subsequently delivered programmes in a number of fields:

• Community Engagement. We have delivered engagement activity with Local Government, Health, Police and Voluntary Sector from Newham through to Middlesbrough, working in particular with hard to reach and engage communities;
• New forms of participation. We devised the Young Mayor programme as well as utilising tools such as participatory budgeting to bring decisions closer to communities;
• Organisational and Membership Development. By 2008/09 we had helped recruit one in six NHS Foundation Trust (FT) members as well as working with FT Governors to develop their skills. We continue to deliver in this field as existing Trusts expand their membership and new Trusts are approved. In addition we have also worked with a range of voluntary sector bodies and trade unions in modernising how they engage with their members and supporters in order to make them more representative and relevant to the people they serve.

In the intervening ten years TCC has also addressed new public policy challenges that arose and developed its understanding of behavioural sciences and set its sights on ‘inspiring change’:

• Community Cohesion in a changing world as migration has become a bigger issue for many local communities who had no previous experience of it. This led to declining perceptions of Trust and increasing perceptions of unfairness, which traditional local government communications actually exacerbated. As a result we brought together a whole menu of alternative approaches including values based segmentation, lay community communicators and effective customer conversations with staff. We recently blogged in more detail on the future challenges in this field.
• Public Health challenges around diet, smoking and sexual health and the rise in importance of social marketing. We have worked with a range of different health commissioners to deliver insight as well as local interventions.
• Community Resilience. Working in collaboration with the RSA and their Connected Communities project and combining it with values segmentation, we have become the leading organisation in mapping local social networks to give a greater understanding of the resilience of communities to withstand the challenges of a prolonged recession. This will in future impact on a wide range of issues such as employability, public health, engagement, communications, trust, public body reputation and cohesion.

New challenges continue to arise. In the coming years we anticipate the following increasing in importance as we emphasise the need to put Values First:

• Service Transformation as organisations face the challenges of engaging with stakeholders and their public over for example more shared services. Ipsos MORI’s end of year survey here, illustrates some of the future challenges in this field.
• Clinically led commissioning. The new arrangements will put many GP’s on the front-line of public engagement and may lead to their current high levels of public trust being eroded.
• Local government led public health. From 2013 local Councils are likely to have a significant opportunity to pilot new holistic forms of public health interventions.
• Social Investment. Iain Duncan Smith, speaking last week, talked about social investment being the way to increase the capital available to build local ‘Big Society‘ programmes and the urgent need for an evidence base. TCC already has trained practitioners in this field.

TCC Managing Director, David Evans reviewing the ten years said:

“Its been an exciting time working at the cutting edge of public policy, developing new forms of engagement and research programmes to respond to the changing needs of our varied client base.

“We would like to thank clients past, clients present …. and clients future.  It has been a great decade and we are still learning and working at getting better at what we do.  We are also so grateful for the many people who have been part of our team over that time (over 200!).

“And we would like to think that we have made a difference (in a good way) for the people we have been fortunate enough to work with.

“As you probably know, Jonathan is taking a back seat now and has moved to South Wales so we are having to face up to the next ten years without him at the helm. But TCC will always reflect his vision, imagination and drive.

“We are looking forward to the coming years as we demonstrate that one can deliver quality work that also provides value for money. TCC has risen to the challenges of the times and looks forward to the next ten years.”

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

National Well-being Index: initial results and second ONS consultation

The development of a National Well-being Index continues with the publication of a report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) entitled: ‘Initial investigation into Subjective Wellbeing from the Opinions Survey‘. The report received lots of TV and newspaper coverage, which focused on the apparently surprising happiness of the UK public at a time of economic gloom.

The report gives the early results from four overall monitoring questions introduced into ONS surveys from April 2011 to show how they are likely to perform. It explores the differences between them with the questions analysed by key characteristics including those relating to what people told ONS was important in the earlier Measuring National Well-being ‘National Debate’. It also shows how the additional subjective well-being questions that were asked over this period compare with one another and to the four overall monitoring questions.

Results

The key results from the initial survey were:

• Three quarters of adults in Great Britain rated their own life satisfaction with a score of seven or more out of 10  and those in employment were found to be happier than the unemployed. However satisfaction with ‘financial situation’ (6.2 out of 10) had the lowest mean score, followed by ‘work situation’ (6.7 out of 10) and also ‘with time to do the things you like doing’ (6.8 out of 10). When asked about satisfaction with the balance between ‘time spent on paid work and on other aspects of life’, there were lower scores, with an average of 6.4 out of 10. People were most satisfied on average with their ‘personal relationships’ and ‘mental well-being’ which had the highest mean scores (both at 8.3 out of 10).
• When asked, ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’ the majority (76 per cent) of adults (aged 16 and over) were estimated to have a rating of 7 out 10 or more. However, a minority (8 per cent) were estimated to be below 5 out of 10. The mean score for this question was 7.4 out of 10. When asked, ‘Overall, to what extent do you think the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’ a slightly larger proportion (78 per cent) of adults rated this at 7 or more out of 10. A lower proportion of adults gave lower ratings to this question, with 6 per cent giving a rating below 5 out of 10. The mean score for the ‘worthwhile’ question was higher than the ‘life satisfaction’ question at 7.6 out of 10.
• When asked, ‘Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?’ again the majority (73 per cent) of adults responded with 7 or more out of 10. However, the spread of ratings was wider than for the ‘life satisfaction’ and ‘worthwhile’ questions. For example a higher proportion of people gave higher ratings (36 per cent giving 9 or 10 out of 10) to the ‘happy yesterday’ question as well as lower scores (12 per cent below 5 out of 10). The mean score for the ‘happiness yesterday’ question was 7.4 out of 10.
• When asked, ‘Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?’ the ratings were even more spread out. Although over half (57 per cent) had ratings of less than 4 out of 10, a sizeable proportion (27 per cent) of people had ratings above 5 out of 10 (that is, closer to 10, feeling ‘completely anxious’ than 0, ‘not at all anxious’). The mean score for this question was 3.4 out of 10.

When estimates are examined by age there appears to be a ‘U shaped’ distribution for the ‘life satisfaction’, ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happy yesterday’ questions. Younger and older adults in Great Britain reported higher levels to these questions on average than people in their middle years. Highest levels were for those aged 16 to 19 and aged 65 to 74. The Economist magazine has previously reported on this ‘U Bend of life‘ age distribution. For ‘anxious yesterday’, this pattern does not appear in the data, which seems to be a new addition to research on the subject.

It was also possible to examine how the four subjective well-being monitoring questions are related with some of the areas that the national debate identified as important for well-being, for example, ‘health’, ‘personal relationships’, ‘job satisfaction and economic security’. In the last case unemployment was used as a proxy for this area:

• ‘Life satisfaction’, ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happy yesterday’ are all positively associated with self-reported health; that is, the better health someone reports the more likely they are on average to report higher ratings for these questions. For ‘anxious yesterday’ the opposite is true, with higher mean scores associated with lower levels of self-reported health.
• Having a partner is also positively associated with the ‘life satisfaction’, ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happiness yesterday’ questions. On average, adults who are married, in a civil partnership or cohabiting reported higher mean ratings than those who are single, widowed, divorced, separated or formerly in a civil partnership.
• Mean ratings of the ‘life satisfaction’ ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happy yesterday’ are all lower for those who are unemployed than those who are employed or economically inactive. However, the largest difference in the mean was for the ‘life satisfaction’ question compared with the ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happiness yesterday’ questions, where the differences were smaller.

This early research shows some interesting differences. However the big question is why? One of the issues is that people have different motivational needs. For example some people may put a much higher premium on safety and security whereas others see status or innovation as the key driver at this stage of their life. So far the ONS data does not cover these sort of differences. The other danger is that as this survey receives more media coverage then a social norm might emerge. Will some people admit to being unhappy to such direct questioning if they keep reading news that over 7 out of 10 claim they are happy? There is thus the need for more indirect questioning and more proxies to measure people’s underlying motivations and attitudes and for this to comparable with global academic research such as the World Values Survey.

At the same time as many people say they are personally happy, nevertheless there are high levels of pessimism as to the prospects of future generations. Recently the Observer newspaper published a special report it had commissioned from Ipsos Mori which showed two-thirds of people believed their children would have lower living standards than their parents. The report said:

Recent history of opinion surveys shows that while people can be very miserable about their own immediate circumstances, they have tended to believe things will be better for their offspring than they have been for themselves. That assumption of rising standards, based on a belief in economic growth, has informed politics and policy making for generations. But these polling figures suggest a historic shift is under way.

How do we take account of high levels of both personal happiness and pessimism towards the future? How ‘historic’ is the shift the Observer article describes? At present the ONS questions do not provide illumination.

We have previously argued here that these differences in terms of drivers as to what makes people happy at various points to their lives needs to be understood in order to make the most of the data. Otherwise ONS will end up with a long time series of information that contributes little to public policy and in the end is questioned over whether it provides value for money in these challenging economic times. Values based segmentation could supplement the current ONS data as it enables us to combine views on current needs and motivations with levels of happiness and pessimism along with beliefs towards authoritarianism v libertarianism and materialism v non-materialism.

Consultation

Methodological testing and development continues and ONS says it has published the material in order to involve users at an early stage and to allow feedback; not only on what these data show but also on how the results have been presented. The ONS has also recently launched its latest consultation and discussion paper on the proposed National Well-being Index, which closes on 23 January for those who are interested in contributing their view based on the material now available.

This consultation seeks views on a proposed set of domains (ie aspects of national well-being) and headline indicators which are outlined in the discussion paper. These factors, described by the proposed domain names, and the central role of individual well-being are set out in Figure 1.

Figure 1. National Well-being framework

TCC have previously commented on the development of the Index during the first consultation and no doubt we will be sending in further views nearer to the close of the consultation.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

Community Cohesion: the views of white working class communities – new report from JRF

The debate over our future relations in Europe raises wider issues as to how communities in the UK respond to a changing world. As well as being an issue for politicians, and the frenzied debate within the Westminster Village, this issue also plays out in local communities across the country, where many of the public may take a more insular outlook not just towards our European Economic partners, but also towards changing communities. An extreme example of this was the incident on a Croydon Tram (quite near TCC‘s office) where a young woman was filmed expressing strong views on her perceptions of identity to the dismay of some other travellers – interestingly they were more concerned about the use of swearing in front of some children present rather than her views on identity – and was subsequently arrested and charged with a racially aggravated public order offence. The video itself has now been viewed over 11 million times online.

However the issue of Community Cohesion is not just about a one-off rant on a Tram. Reviewing the global economy in 2011 on BBC2′s Newsnight on Monday night the distinguished economics and  political philosophy commentators Richard Koo, Francis Fukayama and Gillian Tett all referred to the challenge to wider social cohesion if the current recession follows the path of Japan and lasts 10-15 years. Whilst Japan was seen as a culturally cohesive country that has so far weathered its economic storms, other countries in Europe, including the UK, were seen as facing much greater challenges in sustaining a cohesive society.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has conducted research into attitudes to change and community cohesion in communities that may be most vulnerable to globalising markets and the recession. Their report: Community cohesion: the views of white working-class communities was recently published. They make the important point that:

Community cohesion has been an important driver of government policy since its emergence following the disturbances in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in 2001. It evolved into a programme that cuts across policy domains and the government continues to frame community cohesion in terms of common norms, shared values and trusting different groups and institutions to act fairly.

White working-class communities were engaged with in three neighbourhoods: Aston (Birmingham), Somers Town (London) and Canley (Coventry). These were not meant to be representative but to offer different perspectives on community cohesion from a white working-class perspective. A qualitative approach was deployed during the project in order to give the white working-class a voice as JRF believed that this could not be achieved by conventional quantitative approaches and community study days as well as focus groups, were deployed. Interviews with stakeholders were also conducted.

This approach is similar to the Community Cohesion work that TCC conducted for over 30 local authorities across the country in 2009/10 as part of the CLG’s Connecting Communities programme. Some people in communities often felt inhibited in expressing their views saying, “I can’t tell you what I really think”. These qualitative approaches allow people to express their views much more freely.

Compared to the much larger TCC programme the authors accept that their project was restricted to just three areas saying:

This was a small qualitative investigation composed of interviews and experiential research with fewer than 150 people. The sample and methodology deployed need to be considered but from the outset this was never meant to be a representative project.

As a result they say:

The data generated from this project should spur greater investment in research into white working-class communities using different methodologies including interviews and large-scale surveys. Much more work has to be undertaken.

This is essential. The three areas they chose are for all their differences, areas within Big Cities, all of which have had some degree of diversity from the 1960′s at least. Where their research misses out is working class communities in places such as Lincolnshire of Yorkshire mining communities where diversity has only emerged in the last decade. The previous TCC research sought to engage in those other areas as part of the CLG project.

As well as the direct contact, the JRF also conducted a literature review pointing out that:

In much of the literature, individuals belonging to white working-class communities are variously described as perpetrators of racial harassment, hostile to immigration and inflexible. A social construction of white working-class communities is developed. Typically communities are viewed as being problematic, dysfunctional and occupying annexed council estates. Fixed attributes are ascribed rather than recognising individuals residing in different areas with composite identities. Deviance and threat posed by white working-class communities pepper most academic and policy narratives. In contrast to the limited material on white working-class communities, community cohesion has generated a variety of responses. Initially a number of reports were published from inquiries into the serious disturbances of 2001. The reports recommended interaction between different groups and the development of common values. The community cohesion agenda was formalised into the machinery of government following the publication of independent reports. Much more recently the community cohesion agenda has moved to the issues of integration and identity. In the ten years since the disturbances there has been very little focus on white working-class communities in the community cohesion literature. The academic literature has been largely critical of the concept and policies of community cohesion associating it with a rise in intolerance and inequality.

Some of this stereotyping was described in Lynsey Hanley’s book Estates: An Intimate History as well as Owen Jones book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, however they were books aimed at the wider popular market, so this review has been worthwhile research survey.

The report drew out the following findings from its research:

• White working-class residents not being heard. Three different areas came up with similar findings. The most important of these was the view that residents’ concerns were not being heard by policy-makers at local or national levels. Sometimes this was to do with a lack of political representation (Aston), being ignored (Somers Town) or not being engaged (Canley). Often this was related to neighbourhood change brought about by social and economic factors but the perceived impact of immigration and new communities should not be ignored. The strength of feeling varied in intensity, but in general residents felt that they were constrained and their views ignored.
• Political disconnection. Connected to the first finding was the sense of policy and political disconnect in the study areas. Concern was expressed by political representatives and officers that community cohesion was not clear. There was a sense that government was not listening to the concerns of white working-class communities and not interested in engagement. Policy was seen in the context of political correctness, which had become a pejorative term meaning beneficial treatment to anyone who was not white working-class.
• A need for fairness and equity. White working-class residents did not feel they have been treated fairly by government. The sense of unfairness was most acute in terms of access and allocation of social housing. The perception was that housing organisations rewarded groups who did not appear to make positive contributions to neighbourhoods.
• Complexity of whiteness. The term white and working-class is more complex than the definition used in the study. However, those residents interviewed emphasised the importance of values based on hard work, reciprocity and support. Some white groups such as new migrants and students did not automatically qualify as white and working-class.
• Interpretations of community cohesion. Stakeholders were largely critical of community cohesion and most residents had not come across the term, which has been largely focused on minority communities since 2001. Community cohesion was perceived as being driven by central and local government and not connecting with the concerns of local communities that formed this study. However, residents welcomed the opportunity to discuss neighbourhood change and commonalities with minority groups living in the same neighbourhood. Diversity and difference was not viewed as totally negative.

TCC, in its own research on Community Cohesion, would broadly agree with those findings. A lack of voice, disconnection, sense of unfairness, values determining identity and criticisms of community cohesion that is often driven by people or organisations with a different set of values to the community affected would all be areas we have drawn out from our own research.

The report argues in conclusion that:

A new framework is needed in which to listen to and discuss white working-class communities in order to balance the sometimes exaggerated attributes attached to these groups. They are seen as excluded from mainstream society in terms of norms and space because white working-class neighbourhoods, together with individuals’ pattern of behaviour, are sometimes labelled as being ‘problematic’. Various gaps need to be filled that demonstrate complexity in composition and make reference to power, conflict and neighbourhood loss. People who live in these neighbourhoods are diverse in terms of tenure, gender and age.

It therefore makes the following recommendations:

• The need to reconfigure community cohesion. After nearly ten years of community cohesion as a key policy driver, the evidence from this study shows that it has not succeeded in creating shared values or reducing intolerance. The key priority for community cohesion policy was to ensure that grassroots issues are debated and discussed. No simplistic remedy exists for the perceived problems of white working-class communities but the answers are partly located within those neighbourhoods.
• Making the case for diversity – initiate shared conversations and address policy disconnection. Government has not been effective in championing diversity and change. For the most part, policies designed to support improved relationships between different groups have not quelled concern about the impact of diversity. Residents felt that their views were not being acknowledged and that there was no space for discussions about change, immigration and access to public resources. Local conversations could be mediated and based on the principles of conflict resolution. This type of initiative provides the basis to bring people together on common interests and concerns.
• The importance of informal and routine interactions. An important recommendation is recognising and valuing the informal and routine interactions that take place between different groups. Again, policy sometimes pushes us to find the dramatic project or intervention that builds community cohesion. This means emphasis is placed on creating formal programmes or places that people should come together. The findings from the project suggest routine interactions between different groups can have a significant impact. In shops, in schools and on the street, conversations begin to break down barriers and build cohesion. Informal community engagement presents challenges in terms of quantification and outputs, but residents suggested this is where most of the work in community building happens in practice.
• The state as facilitator rather than driver. The next five years will be marked by dramatic reductions in public expenditure as the new government plans to cut the structural deficit. In contrast with previous governments, there will be less money to invest in neighbourhoods and address issues of community cohesion. This will be a small state in size and philosophy. Given the perception of its role and the reduced size, there is a need for government to act as a facilitator rather than a driver. This does not mean a withdrawal, but recognition that residents and community organisation will be taking on a much more important role in cohesion and community building. For example, the government and authorities could commission local conversations, support community festivals and monitor routine interactions but continue to enforce legal powers on equality.
• Defining the white working-class. More research is needed to deepen our understanding of whiteness and how this is played out in the lived experiences of communities. Residents had a clear and proud sense of values and (to an extent) class, but whiteness was complex and did not necessarily include minority groups such as Poles or students. Specifically how does this vary across class and different contexts?
• Grassroots communication strategies. A finding and policy recommendation is to plug the gap in terms of the policy and political disconnection that many residents in this project experienced. Concern expressed about the top-down nature and interference of policy needs to be addressed by local and national government. Given the emergence of the Big Society it is apposite to consider grassroots communication strategies using routine interactions and existing community organisations. The JRF recommendations have emphasised grassroots rather than top-down interventions. This could be achieved by developing a new cadre of community activists. The development work could cut across different groups and support a network of individuals who will help to focus on positive commonality rather than erosive difference. The end result will be, perhaps, an even greater reliance on grassroots community development as a tool to aid communities in understanding and accepting different groups and dispelling the notion that one has to be disadvantaged to the advantage of others.

TCC would also broadly agree with the recommendations. It is important to develop localised interventions that operate through communications which encourages congruent conversations delivered by local and authentic trusted lay ‘community communicators‘ and which have now been piloted in a number of local authorities to enhance methods of communication, engagement and feedback. Other elements include:

• creating localised ‘shared challenges’ and ‘shared activities’. Examples include Barking and Dagenham’s ‘Eyesore Gardens’ Campaign and its community based St Georges Day Street Parties which drew attendance from very varied communities living in the borough and so reclaimed back the event from extremists;
• mapping the narrower social networks within those communities that may generate narrower ‘bonding’ social capital rather than more networked ‘bridging’ social capital and identifying the gaps where more targeted value for money intervention can be targeted;
• utilising values based segmentation to understand the different mix of values that may arise from that type of social capital which are likely to exist in comparison to the values of those making decisions or delivering services in order to avoid all forms of communication and engagement falling on deaf ears;
• recognise that, as a result of the above, occupational class economic pre-occupations are not the only motivators for behaviour and attitudes towards change within those communities and thus address perceptions of ‘unfairness’ in more localised but visible ways, that demonstrate actions match the words.

The above shows how the recent JRF research can be put into practice using an already developed and tried and tested menu of approaches that makes sure the voice of those disengaged communities is fed into a two-way process of engagement.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

Police Report on Riots: “Community links in the affected areas were often ‘out of date’”

Much recent coverage on the summer riots has been about rioter rationalisation of their actions. The Guardian and the LSE conducted a series of interviews with people who took part in the riots, who explained their reasons for taking part. Some of those interviews were also shown by the TV programme Newsnight.

Post-behaviour rationalisation tends to aim to reduce the cognitive dissonance that anyone might feel after they have taken part in an act which faced overwhelming public disapproval. Thus as well as describing their individual actions much of the testimony also refers to how they perceived the actions of their peers, whether it was obtaining what they described as ‘free stuff’ through to seeing others ‘getting away with it’ which then drove them on to be part of a localised social norm. We covered the details of some of the key motivational drivers for this in a previous posting: Dangerous Crowds? Riots, Anonymity and Deindividuation.

The other recent report on the riots was one from the Police Federation that was leaked to the Observer last week. This raises many concerns over lack of co-ordination and communication and other equipment failures, which will no doubt be considered a lot further when the official enquiry reports in March. That report as well as an interim report by the Metropolitan Police flagged up a concern over weakened Police/community links prior to the riots, which may have exacerbated localised issues to become a much more significant challenge. The Observer article stated:

The chief inspector of constabulary, Sir Denis O’Connor, has also urged a rethink on intelligence, an issue highlighted in detail by the federation’s evidence, which detected a “fundamental intelligence problem” between police and the local community.

It said: “Community links in the affected areas were often ‘out of date’… Anecdotal evidence suggests that many officers were aware of the levels of ‘disenfranchisement’ and the potential for a public order incident, however they had very little specific intelligence to go on.

“When the disorder then erupted it was difficult to call upon community links that may have been able to calm the situation.”

With the Chancellor’s recent Autumn Statement indicating the possibility of up to a decade of economic recession, there is the need to strengthen links between Police and communities in order to minimise any localised incidents that could trigger much wider public order challenges. This not only requires better Police Intelligence, but also:

• Broader ways of communicating issues back to communities. TCC recently presented a case study and a video of how to reduce tensions in a community after a murder at the UK Social Marketing Conference, which we blogged about further here.
• Develop wider engagement that supports community cohesion and community and individual resilience by taking account of a community’s  values and avoiding a values gap arising between those delivering public services and those receiving them.
• Understand the behaviour and values of youth culture in vulnerable low cohesion and resilience areas in order to develop inexpensive early intervention strategies. TCC’s recent research on status dogs conducted just before the riots explored some of the peer group issues referred to above.

These are cost-effective ways of responding to the concerns raised in the Police Federation and Metropolitan Police reports. If those concerns are not taken seriously – as the respected former head of the Metropolitan Police Sir John Stevens warned yesterday – there is a danger that the Government and public bodies will then need far more expensive approaches to address similar problems in financially challenging times.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

Transport Behavioural Insight Toolkit published

I have previously surveyed the work of the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insight Team – better known through the media description of it as the ‘Nudge’ Unit – in order to examine all the areas of public policy they are contributing to. Details of that previous survey is set out here.

The approach it has adopted continues to spread through government. Recently the Department of Transport (DoT) published a Behavioural Insight Toolkit. It provides a practical guide to those responsible for transport policy and delivery initiatives, including local authorities. It shows how behavioural insights can be applied in the transport context to achieve policy objectives.

Similar to what is happening is other departments, DoT say that ‘Behavioural insights are an important component of the Department’s vision for a transport system that is an engine for economic growth but one that is also greener and safer and improves quality of life in our communities.’ In line with Nudge approaches, DoT say the toolkit does not represent mandatory guidance and its use is purely voluntary.

The toolkit sets out a clear methodology and series of questions to consider when developing behavioural  interventions:

Understanding what you are trying to achieve

• Q1. What does the theory say about the factors and influences on behaviour?
• Q2 Which behaviours am I interested in, and why?

Understanding how to achieve your objectives

• Q3. What behavioural insights can I use to achieve policy objectives?
• Q4. Is your organisation best placed to enable behavioural choice, and who else can help?

Getting feedback on whether your initiatives work, reality testing and final review

• Q5. How do I know if my initiative has been successful?

These seem to be broadly in line with social marketing methodology.

The Department says it is currently welcoming feedback from local authorities and others on their experiences of using the toolkit to support the development of transport policy and delivery initiatives.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

Public Health – House of Commons Select Committee Report

The House of Commons Select Committee on Health recently published its report scrutinising the proposed changes in the delivery of Public Health. TCC had previously submitted its own detailed submission with an emphasis on the issue of behaviour and culture change – a summary of which was covered in a previous posting here.

Whilst there seems to be broad public consensus for the Government’s public health proposals, in contrast to the controversy surrounding other NHS changes, nevertheless, the Select Committee made a number of practical recommendations for improvements:

Government role

• The Secretary of State for Health to be given (under the Health and Social Care Bill) an explicit statutory duty to reduce inequalities in public health as well as to protect the public from dangers to health.
• The Department of Health should set public health budgets, both nationally and locally, that take account of objective measures of need.
• The Cabinet Sub-Committee on Public Health to be given a clear remit to scrutinise the public health impact of policies across government.
• The Chief Medical Officer to give professional leadership in respect of both the medical and public health professions.
• The Government to review its opposition to the proposal that the Health Professions Council should regulate public health specialists as an additional profession, to accommodate specialists who are not members of another regulated healthcare profession.
• The role of the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to be clarified

Public Health England

• MP’s argued that Public Health England (PHE) must be a fearlessly independent champion of public health standards and objectives. There is also the need for more clarity about who will be in charge in a public health emergency – such as a flu pandemic.
• Public Health England must also be given a clear leadership and coordination role for developing – and when necessary – delivering ‘surge capacity’ at the supra-local level where public health emergencies cross local boundaries.
• The work of the Public Health Observatories is valuable part of the public health system. MP’s expressed concern that three of these – in London, the North East and the North West – might be at risk of closure. They asked Ministers to clarify their plans for all the Observatories as a matter of urgency to ensure that this important resource is not lost before PHE is established.

Local Government and Public Health

• Just as PHE needs to be visibly independent of central government, MP’s strongly recommended that the director of public health in each locality needs to be a chief officer of the local authority with a statutory duty to address the full public health agenda within the locality.
• Directors of Public Health should also be members of the Board for each Clinical Commissioning Group and for a qualified public health professional to sit on the NHS Commissioning Board.

In terms of behavioural interventions, the Committee made two further important points. On the Public Health Responsibility Deal it expressed some scepticism:

“With regard to the national policy dimension of health improvement, we remain unconvinced that the new Responsibility Deal will, by itself, resolve major issues such as obesity and alcohol abuse. The Government must set out clearly how progress will be monitored, and when tougher action will be taken if ‘nudging’ does not work.

This comment was in a similar vein to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on Behaviour Change which we previously blogged about here. We have also previously suggested some changes to this to encourage business to engage at a much more local level.

The other concern expressed by the Committee was on the Health Premium, where it asked the fundamental question as to how one balances the need to target the most difficult public health challenges if incentives are then given to the areas that make the most progress, which may not be the objectively worst areas?

“We are concerned about the so-called ‘Health Premium’. The effect of this policy appears to be to target resources towards those areas which have made greatest progress with their public health challenges and away from areas which face the greatest outstanding problems. It is, of course, not only a question of the level of resources, but also of the use to which they are put; but if resources are not being used well in the areas of greatest challenge, the solution is to improve the way the resources are used, not to cut the resources”.

We know from our use of values segmentation to understand varying motivational needs that some segments of the population are more likely to respond to pro-social public health messages and behavioural interventions, so the danger is that some areas could always be the winners under incentives for maximum progress. Clearly the Premium is going to have to be much more sophisticated than that!

Hopefully the Government will clarify policy in these areas further. It would be a disappointing if such an important area of public policy with such a wide consensus so far was mired in political controversy.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

‘What makes people tick’? New book explains effective use of values in public policy

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to be invited to the launch at the RSA of the latest book by Chris Rose, ‘What makes people tick‘, a detailed explanation of the benefits of utilising values based segmentation in gathering insight or running campaigns. The book is now available to buy online here.

Chris Rose has a long track record of campaigning and has previously distilled much of his knowledge into his highly regarded book ‘How to win campaigns‘, of which a well-thumbed copy is naturally on The Campaign Company (TCC) bookshelf.

Starting as Conservation Officer for the London Wildlife Trust responsible for handling planning inquiries and land management he moved on to Friends of the Earth as a campaigner on wildlife, agricultural pesticides and acid rain. In 1985-8 he worked on communications and campaigns for WWF International based in Switzerland. Then from 1988-92 he was Director of Media Natura, a media industry foundation working on environmental communication.Perhaps he became most well-known, when from 1992-8 he was Deputy Executive and Programme Director of Greenpeace UK and Strategic Adviser to Greenpeace International, during the battle over the future of the Brent Spar oil platform. He currently runs Campaign Strategy Ltd.

His latest book ‘What makes people tick‘, details, how the values mapping system developed by Pat Dade and Les Higgins at Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing (CDSM), enables us to look beneath the short-term opinions recorded by pollsters, and cut through the varied behaviours, undertaken for very different reasons, that are all recorded as the same thing by geodemographics such as MOSAIC and ACORN; in order to lay bare the needs, motivations and values that lie beneath and drives much of our individual behaviour, relationships, politics and social dynamics.

Based on a hugely detailed model of the UK population, gathered over 38 years, the CDSM model has been statistically calibrated to fit the internationally validated values measurements of the World Values Survey conducted by Professor Shalom Schwartz at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The differing values Chris describes exists in all countries, and thus the book is an effective guide to be able to recognize Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers wherever they live.

The publication of the book is timely as it adds to the increasing recognition that surveys based on occupational class designations some of which  date back to the 1920′s and more latterly geodemographics are not enough on their own to understand complex modern society. Recent reports in the Guardian and a forthcoming pamphlet by the IPPR to follow-up their recent report ‘Still partying like it’s 1995‘ on understanding the ‘new sources of dynamism within society’ show the relevance of values research to long-term public policy challenges in public health, community resilience, cohesion and social mobility. They are also helpful in understanding contemporary events such as the recent riots as this blog posting demonstrates.

For experienced values practitioners there will of course be much that you will already know. This book is clearly aimed to introduce the concepts. However Chris said at the book launch that he had enough material already for a more detailed follow-up.

As well as TCC; companies and campaigners, from Greenpeace to Shell, from the National Trust to Unilever, from the US Marines to the BBC and from McDonald’s to Arsenal Football Club, have used the values segments that are described to build strategies that work, in marketing, in environmental change campaigns, in team building and in communications. The book gives examples, principles and also excellent checklists and guidelines to enable others to utilise this form of segmentation too.

A taster of some of the issues it covers is available online in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Expert Resource Centre document: Consultation and Communication in relation to motivational need. The final Chapter 6 of the new book covers this practical guidance in much more detail and it  alone is worth the price of the book!

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

A Young Mayor for the Olympics!

The Campaign Company (TCC) designed and pioneered the first Young Mayor election in Middlesbrough in 2002. Years later and there are now four Young Mayors in London, in the boroughs of Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Lambeth.  Outside of London, you can find Young Mayors across the country, in Melton, Wyre Forest, Worthing, North Tyneside, Mansfield, Southend, and more.

The most recent Young Mayor election result was announced on 3 November. A total of 10,082 young people cast their vote and elected Abraham Male as the new Young Mayor of Newham – the host borough of the 2012 London Olympics. Abraham, 15, will be in office when the Olympic and Paralympic Games arrive in the borough next year. TCC were very proud to be involved in the project, providing candidate training.

The new Young Mayor received 1,055 votes and the turn out for this year’s election count was 43.37%, significantly higher than the 34.6% turnout at the 2006 Newham local Council elections! More details of the candidates and the election is here at the dedicated Young Mayor of Newham website.

Abraham Male - Young Mayor of Newham 2011/12

Hundreds of thousands of young people have taken part in these elections across the country. Turnout in these elections is regularly higher than the equivalent turnouts in adult elections; some of the most impressive examples being North Tyneside and Lewisham, with turnout reaching 59% and 53% respectively. Thus Young Mayor elections provide demonstrable examples of high levels of youth involvement.

TCC have extensive experience working with young people in a variety of different settings, ranging from youth councils to young citizen’s panels.  As part of the Young Mayor programme TCC can project manage the entire election process and also deliver candidate training.

In May 2008, TCC established the Young Mayor Network (YMN) which gives Young Mayors across the country the opportunity to support each other and come together with a view to getting their voices heard on a national stage. This has now merged with the British Youth Council to enable Young Mayors to contribute to wider UK youth issues.

In the next year we could see more local government  elected Mayors across the country as 12 cities hold referendums on whether to move to a Mayoral system. As a result we may also see more elected Young Mayors established to democratically represent young people to those elected Mayors.

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. Thanks go to Darran Martin at TCC for providing background to the Newham result. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.

TCC at the UK Social Marketing Conference

This week TCC delivered two presentations to the UK Social Marketing Conference, an annual event for those involved in social marketing and behavioral outcomes within public policy to share good practice. As is the custom these days, the event even had its own Twitter hashtag which was #wsmconference, so people could also contribute to it online in real-time.

The TCC contribution was about some of the more challenging areas in the field: Status Dogs and Community Cohesion.

TCC Managing Director David Evans and Justine Pannett of the RSPCA delivered one of the six seminars on ‘My Dog Ain’t no Pussy’ – insight about young urban dog owners. The project sought to understand the key motivations, values and behaviours of young urban dog owners. The project aimed to gain insight into the role that bull breed dogs play in the lives of young people. It is informing the design and delivery of interventions to improve animal welfare in areas that have previously been unreachable. The detailed conclusions of the research has already been blogged about here.

David Evans and Matthew Wood of Brighton University also delivered one of the closing keynote presentations to the entire conference entitled Social marketing engagement to address Big Society challenges. Social Marketing has the opportunity to address new challenges around the Government’s Big Society programme including the new Public Health arrangements and Social Care re-ablement. In particular it can address engagement, to enable new behaviours and social norms to secure greater personal and community involvement and build more social capital and community resilience.

The presentation drew from work in social marketing on community cohesion for the Capital Ambition programme in four London Boroughs and explains how a methodology combining deep insight, psychographic motivational values segmentation, social network mapping, training for staff, the development of lay ‘Community Communicators‘ and a strategy of actions that match communications can be used to address these new challenges. More information is here. The centrepiece of the presentation featured a video about the collaboration between the Police, Council and local ‘Community Communicators‘ to reassure the public following a tragic murder at Thamesmead in Bexley.

David Evans said after the event, “It was very worthwhile to engage with both practitioners and commissioners delivering in this field of work. Social Marketing faces new opportunities in the coming years. This includes creating value for money programmes to improve communications with the public at a very local level, strengthening Civil and Big Society capacity at a time of budget reductions as well as helping deliver the new local government public health agenda.”

Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.