The ability to collect, analyse, and interpret data well lies at the heart of effective research, evaluation, and policy decision-making. Nevertheless, researchers and evaluators face significant challenges that need to be overcome to derive actionable insights and drive positive change:

• Data Availability & Quality: Securing access to complete, reliable data is often more difficult than anticipated.
• Methodological Constraints: Evaluators must balance the need for rigorous methods with real-world data limitations, making it necessary to adapt approaches without compromising validity.
• Ethical & Privacy Concerns: Responsible data use is critical, and navigating consent, confidentiality, and data-sharing agreements adds another layer of complexity.
• Communicating Findings: Making data-driven insights understandable and actionable for policymakers and stakeholders is additionally challenging, particularly when methods and data are complex. 

The UK Evaluation Society conference this year will focus on the theme of ‘Data in Focus’. This hybrid event will provide a platform to bring together evaluation professionals from throughout the UK and beyond and across public and private sectors to discuss these issues in depth. The conference has an exciting lineup featuring plenty of opportunities to enhance our collective understanding of evaluation methods and best practices.

As an evaluation professional and a researcher, I have faced many of the challenges listed above across evaluations in various topics. My presentation, ‘Balancing Data Constraints to Provide a Robust Impact Evaluation of A Better Start Programme’, will focus on how we have navigated these challenges to produce meaningful and reliable findings.

A Better Start is a 10-year, £215 million National Lottery funded program aimed at improving early childhood development across five local partnerships in England. The 10-year national evaluation is led by NatCen in partnership with the University of Sussex, Research in Practice, the National Children’s Bureau, and RSM.

The evaluation aims to assess whether the program has resulted in better outcomes for children and their families in the ABS partnership areas. The evaluation uses a range of qualitative and quantitative evaluation activities, and is designed as a mixed-methods, theory-based evaluation that will use quasi-experimental impact evaluation, ethnographic and qualitative analysis as well as documentary review to form a mosaic of evidence about the impact of ABS. In the quasi-experimental impact evaluation of the program, we at NatCen have worked with a mix of quantitative data sources – data collected directly from program beneficiaries, monitoring data from the partnerships, and administrative data from NHS England and the Department for Education.

While using all these different data sources improves the richness of our analysis and findings, I will be speaking about the various associated challenges we have faced in line with the themes of the conference:

• Fragmented data of varying availability across partnership areas
• Low consent for data linkage limiting representativeness of findings
• Sensitive data around some child outcomes require careful considerations of compliance to ethical and privacy considerations.
• Challenges around building a coherent narrative due to variability in data and analysis approaches.

These challenges are not unique to our work on this evaluation – many evaluators face similar obstacles when working with quantitative data. At the conference, I look forward to sharing how we have tackled these issues in the evaluation to maximise the usefulness of our findings. My session will discuss how we are integrating analysis of diverse data sources while maintaining methodological integrity to form a compelling narrative on the impact of the program. It will align closely with key conference themes, and I hope to spark further conversations on how best to make use of data constraints to enhance policy impact.

Beyond my session, the conference programme offers a range of engaging discussions and presentations on the latest innovations in evaluation. The National Centre for Social Research are conference sponsors and will be present at a number of sessions, including another presentation by my colleague Josh Stevens on ‘Visualising the causal chain to collaboratively revise your theory’ (session 35 room 2).

The National Centre for Social Research will be hosting a panel debate titled “Participation or Pretence? Mainstreaming Participatory Methods to Confront Bias, Power, and the Illusion of Objectivity in Evaluation Design” in which I look forward to an engaging discussion of how we can do better as evaluators to engage communities and stakeholders in shaping research and decision-making processes that directly affect them.

The conference also offers a valuable platform to explore emerging trends, such as AI-driven analysis and innovative approaches to leveraging existing data, are opening new avenues for driving impact. I look forward to engaging in discussions on how we can ensure evaluations remain rigorous, ethical, and impactful in this changing data and policy landscape.