NatCen is best known for large-scale, face-to-face survey research – a method of enquiry we have done much to develop over the last 40 years. Our 1200 interviewers and nurses carried out some 191,100 interviews with households and individuals in Great Britain, across 77 projects. Although the vast majority of these were conducted in participants’ homes using Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI), we also offer sophisticated web-based and telephone interviewing and, indeed, fully integrated mixed mode data collection.

But NatCen has also been at the forefront of the development of qualitative social research.Our Qualitative Research Unit, established in 1985, has done much to raise the visibility and credibility of such methods within applied policy research - not least through the development of a systematic approach to qualitative data analysis, known as FrameWork, which is now available as a software package.

Many of our studies combine qualitative and survey methods – and, indeed, other approaches such as desk-based literature reviews and secondary analysis of existing datasets.

In short, while our origins may lie in social surveys, our capabilities have long since expanded to encompass the full range of methodological approaches. We choose our methods to fit the research questions we are addressing. But whatever our methods, you can be sure that they will be rigorously and expertly applied.