The main concern of our ongoing research is to investigate how participating in the Makeright project affect inmates, as this will help us improve the project, implement it at a larger scale and help other organisations apply this research to their own initiatives in order to tackle high reoffending rates.
In the past year, through action research, the team of staff and volunteers have continuously reflected on the above question. This has involved informal meetings following every session, journals kept by facilitators and volunteers as part of their practice, as well as formal debrief meetings where key insights were discussed in order to gather feedback and to implement changes in subsequent iterations.
In addition, the project has conducted a series of questionnaires with each cohort:
- RAND [1]
- Warwick Edinburg Wellbeing Questionnaire [2]
- the empathy quotient [3]
- and conducted one-to-one interviews with participants which are being analysed with the Atlas.ti qualitative research software program to identify any emerging themes, as well as contrast inmates accounts to evidence factors that affect recidivism [4].
See interviews that we took to evaluate the Makeright project here.
Bibliography
- RAND www.randeurope.org
- Warwick Edinburg Wellbeing Questionnaire www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/research/platform/wemwbs
- Measuring Empathy http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2004_Lawrence_etal_MeasuringEmpathy.pdf
- Transforming Rehabilitation https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/243718/evidence-reduce-reoffending.pdf