Danielle Tucker, Pamela Yeow and Alison Dean, 10th December 2020

Research collaboration in academia is an important part of what we do, not only for developing new research ideas and pooling resources and skills, but also for personal motivation and camaraderie.

We have been working together since 2008 on a variety of research projects about the role of organisations on societal behaviour change. Over this time we have gotten to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and understand how we work together. However, when our most recent project suffered severe disruption due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK in March 2020, we not only had to adapt our research methods, but also had rethink the way we worked together collaboratively.

In this article, we reflect on some of the changes we have made in recent months, which have led our research collaboration to evolve and become more…

Danielle Tucker, 5th November 2020

We get asked a lot about the methodological value (or limitation) of studying household decision making during a time when measures to prevent the spread of a global pandemic meant that many households were spending more time in their homes, and had limited access to resources.

We believe that this focus on the home environment has benefited our research in a number of ways:

1. Studying householders at a time when they are spending more time in their home environment the relational dynamics of household members more salient.

Our research took place in July 2020, in the midst of the gradual easing of the first round of lockdown restrictions (in the UK) put in place to control the spread of a global pandemic. A period of enforced ‘shelter in place’ had provided time for households to reflect on their relationships…

How we pivoted our research methodology during COVID-19

Danielle Tucker, 12th October 2020

In February 2020, our research team received funding from Eastern ARC to continue our work on rethinking ethical consumerism. Like so many other research projects this year, in March COVID-19 caused us to rethink our research methodology. Here we explain our thought process for doing this and share with you some of the unexpected insights and compromises which resulted from this shift.

Research objectives:

1. To understand the household decision making journey of single-use plastics

2. To understand the approaches which institutions have used to drive behaviour change

3. To understand possible intervention points in the household decision making journey for achieving SDG12

Our research was designed to address our research questions from two angles: institutional approaches and also the household decisions.

To study the institutional approaches we would conduct desk research to collate and evaluate institutional…