Community in Focus

Can you beat the ‘Data Detective’?

The HDRC public involvement team are actively engaged in promoting awareness of the programme to residents. Over the summer we have attended many health and wellbeing events being run by local voluntary sector organisations.

We developed a game ‘Data Detective’ that can engage people quickly on issues that people felt were important to look at how research could help to evidence the need for change and who would need to be involved.

In most settings we were running a stall so needed to have something that was bright attractive and quick. As we all know when you are at an event there are many stalls and activities that are distracting.

The game asks people to decide on a topic and to think through what would happen if it was researched. The game gave us the opportunity to explore what data needed to be collected and where this could be found, who would they need to talk to and what questions they would need to ask.

It enabled us to understand what people thought about research and what their concerns were about needed for change and their frustrations that often they were asked but nothing really changed.

Alison Roberts – THCVS Partnerships Manager “It was a good resource to engage people quickly and get them interested in being involved in other research opportunities.”