Visualizing Complex Data to Engage a Non-Researcher Audience

Background: Within Children's Services in the UK, there is a growing interest in the use of evidence-based approaches to improve outcomes for children. There is also awareness that the way these programmes and practices are implemented has an impact on outcomes. As a result many of these programmes and practices require the collection of large amounts of data to monitor implementation. This requirement has not necessarily been met with the use of innovative tools for presenting data back to non-researchers. Effectively engaging practitioners and decision-makers with complex datasets that may hold key messages for them is as important as good quality data analysis.  The proposed workshop presentation seeks to demonstrate one such novel tool.  Our key message is that in order for data to be most useful it must be presented in a way that is easy to understand, allows interaction with the data and therefore engages and interests the user.

Inspired by the work of the Gapminder project, the Social Research Unit at Dartington has taken a large scale dataset containing a huge range of information around the implementation of a widespread evidence-based programme and applied a similar visual methodology in order to make it accessible to a much broader audience.  Our interactive visualisation and presentation allows the user to explore what would traditionally be a large and unwieldy static spreadsheet in an intuitive manner and ask questions of the data by manipulating multiple variables within the dataset.  Furthermore it has the functionality to track change in variables across time, in two different formats depending on user preference, and quickly display the variation of any variable.

The presentation will cover the key concepts of monitoring programme implementation but only as a necessary introduction to make the tool accessible.  It will also cover the process of designing and creating such a tool, however the main section of the presentation will concentrate on the tools use by focusing on the central question it was designed to help answer - what are the most important drivers to the successful delivery of an evidence-based programme? As the tool is interactive there is great potential for engaging the group in exploring the data presented.

Implications: we will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of presenting data this way, namely the competing demands of making data available to a wide audience and being able to communicate clearly the context of the data that is essential to its interpretation and use.