This report outlines the findings of the Right Here Right Now (RHRN) pilot study, a 6-month study of the feasibility of using near ‘real-time’ data collection to capture and communicate people’s lived experiences.
Right Here Right Now arose from concerns within the Public Health community about the growing need for more timely information on how current economic and social changes are affecting people’s lives, to better support policy responses.
The rapidly-evolving policy landscape also poses challenges for policy-makers and practitioners as traditional methods of evidence-generation cannot keep pace with such rapid developments. RHRN sought to help bridge the gap between data collection and generation of evidence, by testing ways of providing policy-makers with new forms of evidence on the impacts of social and economic changes brought about by welfare reforms, a changing labour market and austerity measures.
The vision of RHRN was to establish and run a dynamic data collection, interpretation and dissemination process that can be used to better understand people’s experiences of a range of influences on their everyday lives.
The report describes the approaches taken to: establishing effective and efficient ways of capturing near to ‘real-time’ lived experience data; answering important research questions quickly to promote better understanding of how people are responding to events; and helping to inform decision-making by providing valid and useful data to key stakeholders and participants in near ‘real-time’.
It also outlines the findings of an evaluation of processes and outcomes involved in the delivery of RHRN and discusses how the insights and learning from this 6-month pilot can inform future design of studies aimed at providing timely evidence on lived experiences to aid decision-making