Rapid evaluations are increasingly being used in social care to provide evidence about the implementation, experiences and early outcomes from service developments and innovations. They are particularly useful in complex and fast-moving social care environments as they can help decision-makers to understand if they are heading in the right direction. The findings can be used to adapt the design of an intervention, stop or change course if necessary or encourage others to copy what is being done so driving faster spread of successful innovations.
Rapid evaluation can accommodate a range of types of methods and approaches, but these may be adapted to enable research that moves quickly to provide quality evidence.
Socrates Rapid Evaluations
In Socrates, we develop evaluation plans in collaboration with evidence users and public advisors to make sure our studies deliver evidence that can help to make a difference on the issues that people care about.
We evaluate over short timeframes, sometimes in short cycles of data collection and analysis, ensuring that research takes place during relevant moments of innovation, service development or implementation. We feedback findings early, through discussion with public advisors, services and commissioners. This ensures research insights can feed quickly into service improvements.
We share the findings from our evaluations in multiple forms to ensure these meet the needs of diverse audiences. And we encourage people from across social care to engage with our findings, to ensure that they can be used to improve practice in different parts of the country.
Learning together
Our approach to evaluation is grounded in a commitment to learn together. We meet regularly, cocreate spaces of reflection and knowledge exchange, to build skills and capabilities in the team. We also promote an ethos of learning together when we share findings. This means we learn from services, providers and public advisors to strengthen our analysis, sharpen the focus of our evaluation activities and improve our ways of working for future evaluations.
We also commit to innovating in our own research practice. For example, experimenting in the use of technologies and coproduction to understand the ways in which this can be built into ethical and rigorous rapid data collection and analysis.
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
We use our understanding of diverse, intersecting and entrenched inequalities to guide our work. This means we ensure that our public advisory group involves individuals with diverse backgrounds and that organisations working with diverse groups are part of our networks. Through these mechanisms we can bring different perspectives into our understandings of evaluation priorities.
We consider intersectionality and use a compound in/equalities lens to scope evaluations, and think through site/participant recruitment, data collection methods, analysis strategies and dissemination activities. In relation to each of our evaluations, this involves thinking about the theories of justice that underpin interventions and which social groups are marginalised or underrepresented, and trying to find ways to bring their concerns into the evaluation design within the constraints of rapid evaluations.
Rapid when rapid is right
Rapid evaluation is not suitable for all innovations, contexts or types of research question: some outcomes and impacts only occur over long timescales, some innovations may need long periods of development and take time to deliver benefits, and it can take a long time to build the trust necessary to engage some groups of people in research. We only conduct rapid evaluations where we believe rapid research can provide relevant insights, and make a difference.