Engaging People on Probation Study

Background

The Ministry of Justice Probation Service was seeking to develop an effective and well-embedded model of EPOP which secures visible and impactful opportunities for People on Probation to contribute to and influence the design, delivery and review of probation services.

St Giles and The Wise Group came together to form a partnership and won the competition. 

Dr Maria Fotiadou was then asked to develop a survey for this contract which would run twice a year until the end of this project. 

Research Activity 

The EPOP survey aims to understand the levels of capability, opportunity, and motivation of probation service personnel to engage more widely with People on Probation. 

The first, baseline survey was circulated in September 2022 and the data collection was completed in mid-December 2022. A total of 685 responses were received.

Quantitative and Qualitative data, methods, and tools. 

The COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation – Behaviour) was used to understand how people feel about the factors that can be key to behaviour change.

We worked together with the Ministry of Justice Probation Team to include a number of statements that would help us understand how people feel about their capability, opportunity and motivation when it comes to working with people on probation.

The quantitative informationwe gathered from this survey provided useful statistical evidence and key areas that need to take into consideration.

However, to find out “why” people feel this way we looked closely at the qualitative data – that is, the language used by the people who responded to our survey. 

The survey includes a set of open-ended questions that aim to capture the Probation Staff’s views, opinions, and suggestions on the EPOP project.

The linguistic dataset was used to compile a corpus, the EPOP2022 corpus, which is comprised of 33,186words. 

Analysing participant feedback (quantitative and qualitative)

Corpus Linguistics methods and tools were used to locate the most frequently used words and statistically important keywords and patterns. 

These patterns were then closely examined and categorised.

A detailed analysis of the respondents' answers to the open questions was provided in the first research report.

This in-depth linguistic analysis of the qualitative data (participant linguistic feedback) helps us identify key frequent patterns that are statistically important and can also provide useful insight into the underlying themes of the responses provided by Probation personnel.

Suggestions for improvement

A list of recommendations that was developed by the St Giles Wise team based on the results of the EPOP 2022 Survey was included in the report.

Outcomes

The EPOP2022 Report findings and the list of recommendations were taken into consideration by the Probation Service Management Team. The two teams (MoJ and St Giles Wise) worked together to create and implement an Action Plan that would bring the desirable change to the Probation Service.