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Section 2 Key principles of quality in research and consultation

2.05 Rethink representation

Much research and consultation pursues the goal of achieving ‘representativeness’. This is often a democratic goal which aims to include a range of people’s views. It also has a statistical meaning. The different ideas about representativeness tend to get mixed up and can be a cause of concern amongst social housing organisations if, for example, they feel that poor response rates are undermining the basis of the research findings or that the views of numerically small or dispersed groups of service users are overlooked. It may be more important to ensure that all service users have opportunities to make their views known through a diversity of approaches, than to pursue a goal of strict statistical representativeness that is very difficult to achieve in practice and may not be necessary.

The quality and usefulness of research may be enhanced by rethinking what is meant by representativeness for each research context. Meaningful representation is discussed more thoroughly in Section 3.

Practice point

• Meaningful representation rests on the idea that all service users have opportunities to make their views known through the use of a diverse range of methods, but recognises that some people will not be interested in giving their views, whatever efforts are made by their landlord to seek them.

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