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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

3.14 Budgeting for research and consultation

It is difficult to provide any hard and fast rules for estimating the costs of research and consultation. The least resource-intensive form of research is that which makes best use of existing information, existing groups and in-house resources such as using feedback from staff, and using comments, compliments and complaints as feedback. There are a number of tools and techniques in this guidance that facilitate best use of existing resources and staff-service user contacts.

Research and consultation that collects new data is more expensive in time and cost. Figure 3.5 sets out typical research costs for new data collection. In general, qualitative research is likely to be cheaper than large scale quantitative surveys involving use of fieldwork interviewers. In-depth individual interviews are more time consuming than group interviews, but in both cases it is unlikely to be necessary to conduct as large a number of interviews as would be undertaken in a survey. Of the different survey types, postal and short service-specific surveys are likely to be cheaper than face-to-face surveys.

Figure 3.5 Typical research costs for new data collection

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