Insight Research

Research helps our clients understand what moves and motivates people to behave in certain ways, and what needs to be done to encourage attitudinal and behavioural change in relation to a specific social issue.

The relationship between individual and context is central to theorising about behaviour and attitudinal change. This relates to the ability for an individual to determine his or her behaviours on one hand, and the extent to which an individual’s decision making is more widely determined by the environment within which he or she lives. It is important to understand the immediate influences that may lie outside an individual’s immediate control, alongside individual lifestyle choices and options. The interplay between these two factors is central to insight research undertaken within the Ipsos MORI Social Marketing Unit.  

Insight research, driven by understanding behavioural theories, can take various forms:

• Desk research and literature reviews to review and learn from existing evidence
• Review of current services and service provision
• Identification of key stakeholders
• Stakeholder depth interviews to draw on expert policy and frontline service experience
• Flexible and iterative primary qualitative research
• Quantitative research to assess the scale of a social problem or issue, or the size of different audience segmentations
• Exchange and competition analyses
• Audience segmentation
• Co-designing public services
• Customer journey mapping
• Reviews of recent media coverage and online discussions to place issues in a social context
• Collection of baseline data against which future change can be measured
• Participatory development of stakeholder strategies using action planning workshops