What is the biggest challenge you have faced during your career?
The biggest challenge I have faced in my career came when I was appointed to the position of training manager in 2014. I was tasked with the responsibility of resourcing two central London data collection centres and revamping our outdated recruitment and assessment day processes. In an ever-challenging industry, facing ever more competition to attract people with budget constraint, I had to streamline our recruitment process to make it more a durable, while ensuring we were attracting quality candidates.

In terms of our assessment days, I had to revamp our materials and our theory element to better stand up with the challenges interviewers faced daily to increase respondent participation. I was able to align the practical elements of data collection with better techniques to encourage respondent participation through more realistic role plays and the development of workshops to help interviewers progress.

What will be the next big trend or development in the research industry, and why?
I feel that balancing the need to use more technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) while retaining the use of human interviewing experience with be part of the next big development of the research industry. While the use of AI is not new and has been developing over the years, I feel that the need to better combine these two elements to provide more quality and nuanced data will be ever more needed.

AI provides efficiencies that can help in many areas, such as analysis and compiling of data. This can allow for lead times to be reduced and helps to cut overall costs, yet these developments must also go hand in hand to ensure the human experience is still retained in the interviewing experience. As someone who believes that methods such as CATI, depth and focus group interviewing still play an important part in data collection, as it better allows the ability to capture nuanced and more personal responses to give more ‘richness to the data’, this I feel will be the next or further development of the industry in the years to come.

Who inspires you as a researcher?
My team inspire me as a researcher. In an age where data collection has become ever more challenging, as commercial enterprises and governmental organisations want data to be delivered faster while ensuring quality is maintained. As a team at Perspective Research, from the directors, managers, supervisors, and interviewers, we all work hard to meet client expectations and ensure the best results are delivered. Telephone interviewing has faced many challenges over the years, for our team to be able mitigate those challenges and still produce results, that really does inspire me.

View the full list of Research Heroes for 2022