Services
What we do
At ATD Research and Consultancy, the attention is in the detail.
We care about the big issues facing society today: mental health, substance misuse, social care, offending, prison reform, rehabilitation, marginalisation and homelessness.
Our
approach
We don't just want to see the tip of the iceberg, we strive to see what lies beneath, to delve into the depths of the issue. We aren't afraid to get to the heart and our duty to you is to independently report what we see and hear.
Our role is to understand and immerse ourselves in the lives of those affected by these issues, through ethnography, observation and in-depth interviews in order to inform commissioning decisions and service design. Our passion is people.
Our goal is to do better for marginalised, stigmatised individuals and that's what makes us good at our job. We genuinely want to effect change, demonstrate change and better outcomes for society, individuals and commissioners. We feel the people experiencing the services or issues in question are best placed to inform these discussions whether this is service users, stakeholders or frontline workers.
Social research to understand and solve complex challenges in society
We delve and fully immerse ourselves into the lives of those affected by issues such as offending, substance misuse and mental ill-health so we can fully understand what is happening on the ground and the services required to support people.
Our methods are built on extensive experience of research across over 60 prisons, all probation regions, the third sector, local authorities and other public sector organisations.
We have a toolkit of qualitative methodologies including in-depth interviews with people with lived experience, staff and stakeholders, case-file reviews, case studies and ethnography.
Being trusted to carry the message
We are driven by our desire to do better for marginalised and stigmatised individuals. Individuals who may find it difficult to be ‘heard’.
We understand how important it is to be trusted by those who share their experiences with us. Our approach is informed by the people experiencing the services or issues in question, whether this is service users, stakeholders or front-line workers.
The people who we work with, who we walk alongside, trust us with their story and their personal experiences. This is a privilege. Our commitment to our clients is that we act independently and impartially; conveying people’s stories and messages accurately and securely to changemakers.
Identifying recommendations
We genuinely want to effect change, demonstrate change and better outcomes for society, commissioners and individuals.
We don’t want our reports to remain on the shelf. We use our passion and expertise to translate our findings on the ground into pragmatic recommendations for service delivery, practice and policy. Our objective, independent and informed approaches are targeted on delivering the best outcomes for providers and service users.
Our recommendations are shaped by the voices of those we heard from and are aimed at individual, organisational and societal level.
What we do
We use this passion and our expertise in consulting those most affected by health, justice and social issues and translate our findings into pragmatic recommendations for service delivery, practice and policy. We want to create better systems for those who commission them, work in them and use them.
We can help you do this through:
Independent qualitative evaluation
We are experts in gap analysis, service evaluation, service re-design and best practice recommendations.
We support our clients to review their existing provisions, highlight what’s working and where improvements need to be made by talking to those involved and invested in these provisions. We can qualitatively evaluate the impact of new services or make suggestions about where new services may need to be considered or implemented.
If you commission a service and want to know how it's performing, beyond the key performance indicators, data and statistics, we can support you in answering key questions, such as: Is the service helping the right people? In the right way? At the right time? What do people who use the service think of it? How can the service be run even better? How can we best meet the needs of service users?
Support with bid and grant writing
Running a small but spectacular service to support marginalised individuals? Not sure where the next funding stream is coming from? Want to showcase the amazing work you're doing?
We can provide an independent, academically rigorous evaluation of your service and dossier of excellence to provide to potential funders, partners and commissioners.
We can also support you in the bid and grant writing process.
Training and consultancy
We have provided training for individuals nationally and internationally.
We provide specialist training on motivating substance misusing offenders based on extensive research and work with this cohort. The training advances the use of traditional recovery models and tools by encouraging consideration of quality of motivation, rather than its mere presence or absence. It considers how psychological frameworks can create spaces and environments that allow intrinsic motivation to flourish.
We also train on initiating behaviour change in offending cohorts and using forensic psychology to inform therapeutic environments.
We offer consultancy and support to frontline workers working with offending cohorts particularly around motivation.
We have recently delivered training around trauma informed research practices, delivering work on trauma at national and international conferences and can offer this to other consultancy teams.