Jonathan: Researcher at British Red Cross
Jonathan completed his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. He was a Research Intern for the British Red Cross for 3 months which was an opportunity he foudn through the FASS Internship Scheme.
Case Study
I started my placement with the British Red Cross. My main task was to research the flood recovery work the organization had carried out following the floods in Cumbria in 2015. This involved five key tasks: understanding what recovery work had been done, selecting specific elements of the recovery work to ask quantifiable questions about, writing a questionnaire to gather answers, and ultimately analyzing those answers and compiling my insights into a report.
My first task—understanding the Red Cross’s post-flood efforts—threw me in at the deep end. On day one, my manager handed me a massive amount of information—hundreds of pages of evaluations, reports, and statistics, plus about forty Excel spreadsheets detailing the digital aspects of the help provided. I spent the next few days trying to make sense of it all. A meeting I was able to arrange on the third day of my work in Kendal proved especially helpful. There, I met with one of the workers who had coordinated the recovery project across the county. Talking with him sparked initial ideas about what the flood and its recovery work meant on a personal level, beyond just database entries and demographic statistics.
With this new understanding and after a briefing with my line manager, I chose three specific questions to research in more detail. First, how did people get in contact with the Red Cross? Second, what kind of aid did those affected expect from the Red Cross? And finally, did the Red Cross’s work help people recover?
To answer these questions, I decided that a short online and telephone survey would be the best approach. I created the survey using SurveyMonkey, gathered email addresses, and sent it out. Conducting the telephone interviews was more time-consuming—over two days, I called around 150 people and only managed to get fifteen replies. In total, I collected twenty-seven responses. While this sample size was smaller than ideal, it was enough to see some trends starting to emerge.
The fourth part of my work involved making sense of the data I had collected over the next four weeks. Many of the general conclusions were fairly obvious—like the fact that it’s best for help to arrive as soon as possible after the floods. The challenge was in proving these points with the available data. For instance, when it came to response time, I noticed a clear trend in some of the databases showing that fewer and fewer people sought help from the Red Cross as time passed after the floods. However, the other two questions proved more challenging to answer.
In the end, I was given the opportunity to present my research findings at the Intern Showcase 2017, and I am really pleased to share that I won the competition.