Building research communities to pay it forward

In this blog, ADR UK Director Dr Emma Gordon reflects on the launch of a new ADR UK affiliated community and the power of researcher-led groups to increase impact and reach.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the launch event for a new community group affiliated to ADR UK – the Education Inequalities Policy & Evaluation Community, or EIPEC for short. 

This new community of researchers is being led by ADR UK Fellow Dr Pallavi Banerjee, based at the University of Cambridge Department of Education. As well as being both thought-provoking and interactive, the event gave me the opportunity to reflect on just how far we’ve come in our mission to open up access to linked administrative data for public good research. 

EIPEC joins several ADR UK Affiliate Communities of Practice, which have formed organically as our programme has matured. Most have been developed by ADR UK-funded researchers who have chosen to invest their time and energy into building communities of practice around the use of ADR UK Flagship datasets with a shared goal to use this robust data source to inform policy and practice.

Why do we need communities of practice? 

Let’s be clear: the journey to undertake analyses using linked administrative data is not straightforward. 

The underlying data within these datasets was not designed with researchers in mind. Instead, it was collected through our everyday interactions with public services, in all the different messy and incomplete ways that may be. ADR UK funds the process of making these rich data collections research ready for secure use by accredited researchers. This process is no mean feat. Anyone whose worked in data will know the multitude of steps that must be completed to clean, prepare and deidentify information before it is ready for a researcher to even apply to access it. 

And, once a researcher has gained project approval to access the data, the journey isn’t over. They will need to continue to build their knowledge in how to make sense of the dataset - from getting up to speed with the metadata, to studying user guides, and understanding how to make the most of any linked data. The researchers that ADR UK have funded are often among the earliest researchers to use a dataset, so a lot of what they are learning hasn’t yet been written down by someone who has gone before, and exists only in the minds of our earliest users. 

The power of communities

This is where communities of practice really come into their own. These groups are led by passionate researchers who have built understanding of this complex data, and want to help others to successfully undertake their own research. These groups can showcase early research already completed using the data, flag and solve challenges with the data, propose new uses, and even provide training. 

The fact that people want to do this in support of ADR UK data use is incredibly motivating for me and my team, and invaluable for future researchers. It also demonstrates that the ADR UK model really is facilitating wider public good impact, beyond the delivery of projects by those researchers we are directly funding. 

Showcasing data use for reducing educational inequalities

For this new community, last week’s event was a moment to bring together researchers from across a range of sectors who are all motivated to make positive contributions to our collective thinking in how we reduce educational inequalities.

Pallavi convened a very broad group to showcase the work delivered so far. Just to pick out a few of these inspiring speakers, we heard from Dr Golo Henske from UCL about his research into how inequalities on STEM pathways arise from school and on into work. We also heard from Professor Andy Westwood from Birmingham University sharing his insights as an advisor to the Department of Education and Skills England, and Chris Stephens, a Deputy Head of a secondary school, on his observations around how inequality of opportunity and experience leads to differences in outcomes. 

A full circle moment

I was particularly pleased to hear from Marta Stryjniak from the University of Cambridge, who spoke about her PhD research looking at how sociodemographic characteristics relate to university application behaviour and the mechanisms that underpin those relationships. Marta is one of our first cohort of ADR UK-funded PhD students and has recently submitted her thesis. 

I remembered very vividly launching our first PhD funding call, as at the time it felt like we were only at the very start of our journey into opening up access to linked administrative datasets for public good. We thought we had everything in place to support PhD students to use these datasets, but this first cohort was our route to really testing that hypothesis. The fact that just a few years later, we have researchers such as Marta presenting their findings at the launch of a new community group to further extend the use of our data is amazing to witness, and a real full circle moment.

We are now in the process of commissioning a new cohort of thirty new PhD students, who will all be using linked administrative data in their research. I have every expectation that they will go on to have equally fulfilling experiences as Marta and will be able to benefit from all the work being done to build communities of practice around the use of administrative data for public good research. 

So, I extend a big thank you to Dr Pallavi Banerjee and all our community leads and members, for paying forward their knowledge and passion for administrative data to the next set of researchers.

Find out more about the EIPEC

To explore more about the work of the EIPEC, and its goals to provide a dedicated, cross-sector forum on education related inequalities and policy evaluation using administrative data, visit the group's new website.