How we will provide the first international comparisons of ‘claimant experiences’

This project wants to change the way we compare social protection systems. To date, most research has looked at whether these systems reduce poverty and encourage people to work. These are important, but from speaking to claimants, we know that other things matter too – some systems may provide dignity, a sense of security, and feel fair; others may leave people stigmatised, insecure, and feeling unjustly treated. These experiences are important in themselves and crucial for understanding the impact of social protection on health and work.

Through a comparison of five countries (Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Spain and the UK), we will provide one of the first international comparisons of ‘claimant experiences’ such as dignity, security and justice.

This will also help us to understand how these experiences affect mental health and work, and how policies influence these experiences. Together, these will help advance academic knowledge, and also contribute to making claimant experiences better in these countries and beyond.

We have four objectives:

1. To think about what ‘claimant experiences’ are – or put another way, which aspects of these experiences really matter to people claiming benefits;
2. To compare the experiences of people claiming benefits across Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Spain and the UK;
3. To understand how different policies can make claimant experiences better or worse;
4. To understand how claimant experiences can affect people’s mental health and whether or not they move into work.

Crucially, we will do this research in partnership with people claiming benefits themselves. This will make our work better and better trusted, because it draws on their expertise; but more importantly, this is the way that we ourselves think research like this should be done.
To achieve this, we have three strands of work.

Work package 1: A new way of thinking

WP1 runs throughout the duration of the project and focuses on brining different types of knowledge together as we seek to understand how people feel about their experiences of receiving benefits. The work package underlines the core value of epistemic justice in the project through including the experiences and knowledge of those receiving benefits in our research design, data collection and analysis. Central to work package are third sector organizations representing those receiving benefits.

The work package has kicked off the overall project through a series of country specific workshops using a range of methods, including creative approaches, will be conducted with people receiving benefits in the five countries. These discussions will focus on recipients’ journeys through the social security system to understand the different dimensions of experiences and the language that people use to describe their experiences.

These discussions will take place alongside a review of an academic literature review – and will create our conceptual framework that will be used in work packages 2 and 3.

Work Package 2: Innovative qualitative comparisons

Second, we will look in-depth at claimant experiences. We draw on findings from work package 1 to inform the traditional in-depth interviews that we will first use to talk with people claiming benefits. After, we will use more innovative ways to follow the experiences of these people over time:

• We will use an online app where people log in their thoughts when they speak to someone about their claim (whether this takes place in person, online, by phone or by letter). Logging in can include a text, picture or audio recording of thoughts about the interaction experienced. For people who struggle to do things online, we will create an alternative approach that works for them.
• We will also conduct quick interviews by phone as soon as possible after key moments in people’s claim (which we will be able to see from the online app).

By doing this across five countries, we can explore how claimant experiences are affected by particular conversations or messages as part of their claim, and how this is shaped by different sorts of affectual responses (for example, trust, security, despair, humiliation) that people experience as they claim benefits in different systems.

Work Package 3: Robust quantitative comparisons

Third, and building on work packages 1 and 2, we will develop and conduct a large-scale survey of claimants across the five countries. This survey will incorporate what we have learned from Work Package 1 about what people claiming benefits think are the most important aspects of their experience when claiming benefits.

The survey will be done in two ways:

• A large online survey: This is a cost-effective way of reaching a large sample of people in each country. Large samples allow us to examine differences between different kinds of claimants within each country. An online sample also allows us to follow up the same people on multiple occasions, to see what has happened with their claim, and whether this has affected how they describe their experience of their country’s welfare system.
• A smaller telephone survey: Telephone surveys are substantially more costly than online surveys. However, they are important to ensure that we reach people who do not have access to the internet, or who struggle to do things online.

The results of the survey will allow us to make statistical comparisons, and therefore to answer important questions about how much the experience of claiming benefits differs between countries, how this might be related to how the welfare system works, and what effect these experiences might have on claimants’ mental health and likelihood of returning to work.

Changing research and policy

Additionally, we will aim to make our work visible and understandable for various audiences. The project results will be published in academic articles as well as for policy audiences.

We will work with key stakeholders such as international bodies, lived experience organisations and national-level media and policymakers. For these audiences, we will aim to create bespoke public-facing content from academic and lived experience experts including blogs, professionally produced podcasts, and interactive visualisations showing how claimant experiences vary across countries and groups.

Within our project, we will also aim to create spaces in which lived experience and academic experts can discuss policy choices with others, e.g. training/supporting lived experience experts to speak for themselves to the media, and events with policy stakeholders to do ‘backward mapping’ from positive interactions to the policy decisions that could enable them.