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Abstract
Qualitative tools are potentially powerful to gain understandings of the voluntary sector’s (VS) engagement with public service delivery. This is because of the strengths associated with qualitative methods to gain specific information on an area as diverse as the VS and the ability to carry out comparative analyses. Despite this, research on the VS is dominated by work that uses quantitative tools. Using a case study of research conducted on VS’ engagement with the government’s welfare‐to‐work programme, the New Deal for Young People, I discuss three advantages commonly associated with qualitative tools. These are the flexibility of open‐endedness and the importance of understanding processes and staff’s perspectives. I conclude that if the government wants to keep the VS engaged in the delivery of public services, they need to understand what keeps the VS involved and that qualitative tools can make a substantial contribution towards understanding this.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding my study – Can Voluntary Organisations Successfully Sustain Engagement with the New Deal for Young People? – through the ESRC CASE STUDENTSHIP and for their further support to disseminate findings with an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship. I am also extremely grateful to Professor Peter Halfpenny and Professor Fiona Devine for their continued tutelage and support. Thanks also to the staff of the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, who were kind enough to provide useful feedback on a very unfinished presentation for this paper and to Professor Pete Alcock who was kind enough to give me extra time to return and finalise this paper at a very busy period of setting up the ESRC Third Sector Research Centre’s research agenda. Finally, but not least, I am thankful to the staff of the organisations in my study who were generous with their much‐stretched time.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper won the 2008 Campbell Adamson Prize at the VSSN/NCVO Annual Research Conference, 2008.
2. There is no political reason for this choice; instead, for simplicity one label was selected and used consistently throughout the paper.
4. There is no consensus on the definitions for each of these terms and some evaluators question the distinction, or do not distinguish between them. For further discussions, see, for example, Wainwright (Citation2000) and Moxham and Boaden (Citation2007).
5. There are, however, qualitative studies. See, for example, The UK Voluntary Sector Research Group (Citation2003) and Wainwright (2004).
6. This is not true of them all because some reports produced with the practitioner in mind have raised methodological questions to do with, for example, reliability and validity, the difficulties of assigning causal links to a specific intervention (The UK Voluntary Sector Research Group, Citation2003; Wainwright, Citation2000).
7. For brevity, hereafter, I use the term New Dealer to refer to young unemployed people who entered the NDYP programme.
8. The project was carried out in two employment areas in Greater Manchester that cut across four (out of 10) local authorities.
9. As it turned out, at the time of the fieldwork, the majority of the (27) organisations were not in receipt of New Deal participants and some were no longer engaged with the programme.
10. One of the interviewees was on the management committee of an organisation, but was a paid staff during their organisation’s engagement with the programme. Interviewees across the 27 organisations held different positions in their organisations; nevertheless, there was evidence of generic issues arising from engagement with the programme.
11. It is well known that there are different stakeholders of voluntary organisations, such as paid staff, unpaid staff and beneficiaries, and that they can offer different perspectives about the work of the organisation.
12. For reasons to do with eligibility, interviews with staff from two organisations were excluded from the study. This is because one the organisations engaged with other welfare‐to‐work programmes, not the NDYP; the other organisation provided training support to New Dealers, not temporary employment opportunities.
13. A full analysis can be found in Soteri‐Proctor (Citation2007).
14. On top of this, there were other changes, including different contractual obligations, the change of boundaries in employment areas and the change of partnership intermediary agencies.
15. The label ‘play worker’ is the job title used by the organisation to distinguish this work from child care.