The leading UK think-tank Social Market Foundation wanted to better understand young people’s attitudes towards ‘assumed knowledge’ - the kind of information and experiences not formally taught in school but which may be critical in shaping people’s career prospects. This could be things like what wear to job interviews, writing a CV or understanding which degree subject sets them up best for a career in law or banking.
Products used
Focaldata AI
Geographic coverage
UK
Use cases
_Test
The leading UK think-tank Social Market Foundation wanted to better understand young people’s attitudes towards ‘assumed knowledge’. SMF needed an open-ended research tool that could capture the breadth and depth of these experiences, in young people’s own words. Traditional surveys, offering a limited set of pre-programmed answer options, could not answer these research objectives.
To conduct this study, SMF conducted 125 semi-structured interviews with different groups of young people. The team used screener questions to build these audiences with precision, and then the interview set-up to provide research objectives and additional context to the AI moderator. This allowed the team to give the moderator additional guidance for particular areas of ‘assumed knowledge’, in the same way as a focus group moderator may have prompts to gently nudge participants towards a particular topic.
The team made two key discoveries. Firstly, they found examples of assumed knowledge they would not have initially incorporated into a quantitative study, like knowledge of the pensions system. Secondly, the team wanted to extract the most illustrative and rich quotes for each key theme, which they were able to do as a result of the wide range of individuals interviewed.
“The platform exceeded my expectations of what's it's been able to do"
Aveek Bhattacharya, Research Director at SMF
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