Abi Clark

Social Research Degree Apprentice

abi.clark@employment-studies.co.uk

Abi joined IES as a Social Research Degree Apprentice after finishing her A levels in Psychology, English and Spanish, and studies at the University of Kent to complement her learning and understanding at work. Her main interests lie in qualitative research, and she has enjoyed research into disadvantages affecting young people’s experience in education, youth transitions, and early years research. These interests stem from Abi’s experience so far in applied social research, which started from a large-scale project for the Youth Futures Foundation, mapping support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds moving from education to employment, which included literature searches, qualitative data collection write-ups, and formatting visual diagrams.

In other projects, Abi has enjoyed collecting and analysing primary and secondary data, including interviewing teachers for the evaluation of Apps for Social Action and parents on the Tips by Text 2 project, and a literature review for CITB Careers in Construction. She has completed quantitative analysis of qualitative data for IPSPC research into employment support using Atlas.Ti software, and has gained experience using SPSS in analysing survey data. Abi has also been involved in the write up and reporting of a case study of Restart employment support.

Abi’s University modules have complemented her learning and application working at IES, from research questions and methodology, to evaluation, analysis and dissemination of research. In studying for her degree, Abi has brought valuable insights and understanding of different aspects of social research to IES. Her understanding of concepts and measures in social research have enabled her to support work into validated and non-validated measures of concepts used in research, in understanding their dimensions, validity and reliability. Abi has helped interpret research objectives to plan and implement discourse analysis of interviews completed with self-employed workers, utilising skills and knowledge developed through her University course.