Close Encounters Covid Recovery Phase 2

Close Encounters is a service delivered by Age UK Portsmouth and Gosport Voluntary Action to support individuals experiencing loneliness and/or isolation.

This project will take the learnings from the first Close Encounters evaluation, delivered in 2021, and incorporate them into a revised evaluation project which will be delivered via a Masters of Research (MRes) student with supplementary academic support. The first Close Encounters evaluation demonstrated the overall success of the service, which was underpinned by a personalised approach, giving support and encouragement via a range of approaches under the banner of a single service, to empower service users to achieve their goals. The evaluation emphasised the value of embedding practices to ensure that future service design recognises and addresses issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and highlighted the need to consider a broader range of outcomes.

This project will have two components:
1) A qualitative evaluation - semi-structured interviews with four volunteers/staff involved in the service delivery, and six service users, to understand the impact the service has had on people’s lives, and ways in which the service can be improved further.
2) A quantitative evaluation - based on data collected by the service delivery partners, to explore the impact the various components of the service have had on wellbeing and personal goals for people accessing the service, and how these outcomes relate to their personal characteristics. In this way, the evaluation will seek to explore what works, for whom, in what circumstances.