Each year, we run one or two large research projects based on feedback from our members and our Steering Group.

Read more below about what we're up to and how you can get involved.

Research 2020

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PARN Flash Report - Greening the Sector

We are delighted to be able to bring you our first PARN Flash Report. These short focused reports are intended to give our sector a quick snapshot view of the state of the sector in relation to a particular theme or subject area.

The Flash Reports lie somewhere between our long established basic Ask The Network surveys (ATNs) and our annual major research projects.

The current theme is ‘Greening the Sector’ and the next one which we will be starting work on shortly will be ‘Mindfulness in the Workplace’. We have established both of these as showcase reports and they are being circulated free (we can send hard copies on request at cost) in order to demonstrate their value.

We hope that you agree these are simple to prepare and run, engage well with the sector and provide remarkable value in terms of soliciting data and exploring specific sector activity in areas of broad interest.

The intention is to make the commissioning of our Flash Report easy and available to all our service users (there will of course be the usual member discount) and can be used to cover any area you may wish to examine. The fee will to some extend depending on the complexity of the subject and the number of supporting interview/case studies required, but our intention is to keep these inexpensive.

We believe the Flash Report initiative will help provide valuable information to help furnish strategies and provide reassuring benchmarking data to confirm direction of travel, on any number of key areas.

Download 'Greening the Sector' Here

We also hope to be able to follow up our Flash Reports with a series of round table and small seminar type events – obviously at the moment we are restricted to running these virtually but if the ‘Greening the Sector’ report is of interest then look out for further announcements coming soon.

We hope you enjoy the report – it would be wonderful to hear your thoughts and to receive any comments or ideas about this exciting new development. If you should like to talk some more about the possibility of commissioning your organisation's own Flash Report please feel free to e-mail us via [email protected]

 
 

Research 2018-20

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Promoting Professionalism

PARN‘s current major research project aims to address the many challenges the professions are currently facing, including the rise of populism denigrating experience and evidence-based decision making. We want to define what professionalism means, how it must be supported, and what the public benefit derived from it entails.

The research project started in May 2018 with the support of 12 professional bodies who also as act as the "Promoting Professionalism Steering Group". 

Since the inception of the project, we have mapped out a definition's model for what professionalism is for the professional body sector as a whole which we elaborated differences in the definition specific to five broad sub-sectors – Health, Engineering, Business/Management, Finance, Other. The definition model stands on its own as a way to view the professional body sector but it also feeds into our analyses of challenges for professionalism and how we can support and promote its value via the professional bodies.

We have also completed case studies and interviews with the Steering Group members and also with a selection of other organisations – professional bodies and other organisations. This work helped us identify and analyse different initiatives to support professions and professionalism - from modern slavery to artificial intelligence and the next generation of young professionals. As part of this stage, we looked at professional bodies, regulators and other organisations that have undertaken interesting and innovative work around promoting their professions and promoting professionalism in general.  

At this stage of the research, we are looking for further professional bodies and other organisations which have done some interesting and innovative work around promoting their professions and promoting professionalism in general.  In addition we are formulating a Members' Members Survey that Steering Group members will forward to their members for completion. We are also planning to run a Public Opinion survey. The purpose of these surveys is to capture what the public perceives of professionals and professionalism, as well as perceptions members have of the efforts of their own professional bodies towards promoting professionalism but also what are their views of professionalism of other sector professionals. The stage of running the surveys has been extended to early May 2019. Following that, we will be analysing the survey findings in June.  Seven Steering Group members have completed the survey, with the data analysis underway. We are halfway through the qualitative analysis.  

We are now finalising the Public Opinion Survey (POS), aiming to run it by mid-July. For this survey we are collaborating with Toluna Insights; they have a panel of 2 million people in order to achieve a UK national representative sample for our survey.

As the project is unfolding, we shall update our website with our progress. 

 

                                                                                                              

Get involved in our research!

PARN is already planning future research projects based on feedback from our members and from the PARN Steering Group. If you'd like to be involved in shaping future projects and are interested in providing financial support please register for our next research project meeting by emailing our research team or calling them on 0117 928 1998.