The ambitions and challenges of SROI (social return on investment)

With the growing interest in measuring the social impact of third sector activities, there have been a range of approaches developed. One of these, social return on investment (SROI) has received particular attention and is being promoted by third sector organisations, as well as public and private bodies. This paper examines this approach in detail and identifies a series of issues that require further investigation. These include technical and methodological issues related to this adjusted cost-benefit analysis such as quantifying the value of social benefits, and attribution; the judgement involved in setting indicators; whether projects deemed successful based on an SROI analysis can provide the basis for replicability and scaling up; and the ways in which SROI is being used by stakeholders. Through examining these challenges in detail, the approaches to measuring social impact can be strengthened, standardised and made more rigorous. While the issues raised here are essential to developing SROI further, they are also valid for more general discussions regarding the proving and improving of the value added by the UK third sector

The ambitions and challenges of SROI.

With the growing interest in measuring the social impact of third sector activities, there have been a range of approaches developed. One of these, social return on investment (SROI) has received particular attention and is being promoted by third sector organisations, as well as public and private bodies. This paper examines this approach in detail and identifies a series of issues that require further investigation. These include technical and methodological issues related to this adjusted cost-benefit analysis such as quantifying the value of social benefits, and attribution; the judgement involved in setting indicators; whether projects deemed successful based on an SROI analysis can provide the basis for replicability and scaling up; and the ways in which SROI is being used by stakeholders. Through examining these challenges in detail, the approaches to measuring social impact can be strengthened, standardised and made more rigorous. While the issues raised here are essential to developing SROI further, they are also valid for more general discussions regarding the proving and improving of the value added by the UK third sector

Dislocating Applied Theatre: Crossing the Borders between Practice and Context.

Amongst ongoing state programmes of austerity, heightened nationalisms, and a bitter public debate around migration, this research project is positioned within the field of applied theatre. This thesis investigates the ways in which recent examples of applied theatre practice in Yorkshire, that developed in response to the refugee crisis in mainland Europe, were situated in, shaped by, counteracted, contributed to, reproduced and/or resisted contexts of austerity and migration. Through this, the thesis and the research it represents examines the relationship between applied theatre practice and its contexts. First, it develops a critical concept of ‘context within’ for applied theatre, reimagining context as flat, dislocal, and woven through practice. It then seeks to trace the shifting threads that weave between practice and context, and unravel the knotty double binds and points of contradiction on those threads. Alongside this, it draws from critical and cultural theory, with a detailed focus on Gayatri Spivak’s theories of representation, ethical practice, and participation. This research adds to the field of applied theatre by offering a routes and strategies for practitioners and researchers to analyse the relationship that any example of applied theatre practice might have to a chosen context, through original theories of intention, representation, effect and affect, which develop through the analysis of the case study material. It also develops critical thought around what it means to work in an imagined local context, invoking some thinkers largely neglected by applied theatre discourse, to analyse the relationship between the self of the applied theatre practitioner, and the other of the marginalised participant. This research engaged with three arts projects, working on themes of forced migration, in Yorkshire over the course of a year, through an ethnographic process. The first analysis of this case study material focuses on a piece of street theatre that used puppets to share a narrative of a sinking boat of migrants seeking rescue and refuge. The second focuses on the participatory workshops of the second project, which led to the creation of a piece of shadow theatre. The final piece marked the 70th anniversary of the partition and independences of India and Pakistan. Through the case study analysis, I search for the border crossings between context and practice on the four threads of connectivity. The thesis makes claims for the relationship of applied theatre practice to people and place, as enmeshed in unique and dislocal constellations that connect to broader, global networks, and facilitate points of refusal and political effectivity, even amongst a renewed focus on affect in the field. It offers new theories of intention, representation, effect and affect, as intersecting threads on the networks between dislocal constellations of people, place and practice, and contexts. Offering a novel concept of ‘context within’, it also ignites strategies for the field, of ‘working in the local’ and searching for a ‘theatre of little contexts’

Non-resident parents: why are they hard to capture in surveys and what can we do about it?

The under-representation of non-resident parents in surveys has long hindered research on family separation, leaving key evidence gaps for those making policy and practice decisions related to separating and separated families, including (but not restricted to) issues around child support, child arrangements, welfare benefits and housing. In this paper, we articulate the importance of robust quantitative data collected directly from non-resident parents. We review the methods previously employed to attempt to achieve this, and we use the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) (University of Essex, ISER, 2017) to demonstrate where and how response biases occur. The main body of the paper reports findings from an experiment run on Wave 10 of the UKHLS Innovation Panel (Al Baghal et al., 2018; University of Essex, ISER, 2018) in which we compare two approaches to identifying non-resident parents from among the panel members. One method, a variant of that currently used in the UKHLS, asks panel members about living relatives with whom they do not live. The iv second method modifies the UKHLS standard fertility history questions collecting information on past births and then asks whether any such children are under 18 and living outside the household. Our findings are necessarily tentative, with around 100 non-resident parents identified across both arms of the experiment from among the 2,570 panel members interviewed in Wave 10. They nonetheless point towards a potential to improve the survey representativeness of non-resident parents, at least to some degree. While we found no statistically significant differences in the non-resident parent prevalence rates between the two methods, in combination they increased the non-resident parent sample by one quarter. Moreover, the data suggest that the fertility history approach improves the representativeness of the non-resident parent sample, in terms of both their socio-demographic profile and their levels of parental involvement. That said, even the combined approach results in a large underrepresentation of non-resident parents and a continued bias towards those who are more involved with their children