Whilst it’s hard to argue against the Government’s commitment to boost house building to achieve 300,000 new homes a year, the language used in recent statement fails to recognise the massive “elephant in the room.” Rhetoric aside, what about the infrastructure that needs to be built alongside such an unprecedented scale of development? The Housing […]
Patient Information Leaflet user testing could be a thing of the past post-Brexit, but would patients be any better off without it? Ensuring that patients can understand the technical information that accompanies medicines, produced by medical professionals, is clearly a worthy endeavour. Article 59 of Directive 2001/83/EC could be seen as classic red tape, a […]
Amid the hue and cry to save our traditional High Streets, I find it amazing how most people fail to focus on the obvious – carrying out some research into what local residents i.e. customers want and their shopping habits. So, when a public meeting was called locally in the Town Hall to discuss the […]
We’ve recently gained some really interesting insights into the conditions for business growth having run a number of research projects across Somerset. Whilst it’s generally recognised that local Councils, along with other support agencies, have an important role to play in encouraging and developing local business enterprise, delivering change is easier said than done. The […]
Having worked with pupil yield data for the last 12 years, Ian Nockolds, Director at Cognisant shares his views on the implications of the Government’s recent housing White Paper and the CIL Review, for infrastructure funding. My first thumb through ‘Fixing our broken housing market’, the Government’s latest Housing White Paper, was very much focused […]
Evaluation, as a discipline, has many similarities to Market Research. Consistent characteristics of both are: an assessment of the knowledge that already exists a clear focus on the outcome a robust process, and good communication. Your perspective on an evaluation project inevitably changes whether you are the evaluator, the subject of the evaluation or the […]
Ian Nockolds with his Community Radio Award, and Chris Watt Research met Sport recently when Market Research Society member Ian Nockolds won Gold at the Community Radio Awards for his Sports Show on Somer Valley FM. A Research Director at Midsomer Norton based Cognisant Research, Ian, has been an active member of the Market Research […]
What do you do when you need to define a population but the usual administrative boundaries don’t apply, and the client’s budget is limited? What began as a conversation in a Midsomer Norton restaurant, led Cognisant Research and local Community Radio Station, Somer Valley FM, to develop a method of population analysis that could apply […]
The Colston Hall might be Bristol’s largest concert venue, but how does it compare to the cities other arts venue in terms of its popularity? Using Google Trends its possible to compare the frequency with which certain terms are searched for on the internet. The analysis of Bristol’s arts venues has been done by Ian […]
On August 27th, the BBC published a news story highlighting a rising primary school population in England, which is putting pressure on budgets and raising fears of “supersize” schools. In the article, the Local Government Association is reported as saying that councils have had to fill a £1bn shortfall in funding for school places. However, […]