Citizens' Panel - Further Information

In 2003, the Scottish Executive (SE) awarded a grant to Aberdeenshire Community Planning Partnership, to be used to investigate various means of providing greater local understanding of and engagement with the delivery of services. One of the initiatives that Aberdeenshire Community Planning Partnership used this money for was an 18 month long trial of a Citizens' Panel, with the aim of increasing the effectiveness of our community consultation mechanism. Because we found the Citizens' Panel did help us to reach more people and to consult and communicate more effectively, we have now decided to continue it for the foreseeable future.

Background

The majority of Scottish councils (at least 60%) have a citizens' panel and most of these (74%) are run jointly with partner organisations.
Most Scottish panels have at least 1000 people sitting on them. Four out of five Scottish panels use postal surveys to research panel members and 68% of them are used for both quantitative surveys and qualitative research.

We chose to establish a Citizens' Panel because we knew from the experiences of other community planning partnerships that they are broadly representative of the local population, they achieve high response rates, they are cost effective (provided the right techniques/questions are used), they allow access to people who are willing to take part in other research and they allow public sector organisations to work in partnership.

Recruitment

Between December 2003 and May 2004, nearly 20,000 invitations to join the panel were sent out to a carefully selected sample of the Aberdeenshire population.
From this mailing, it was hoped to gain:

• a 'signed up' group of between 1,000 – 1,200 people to form the Aberdeenshire Panel,
• an initial measure of satisfaction levels through an accompanying questionnaire sent out with the initial 14,000 invitations and
• an indication of possible issues worthy of exploration in greater depth

Refreshment in 2006

In May 2006, 100 members of the panel were thanked for their input and retired from panel membership. Another smaller phase of recruitment was undertaken to recruit approximately 150 new panel members. This was necessary, especially after a period of two years to ensure the membership stays fresh and so that other Aberdeenshire citizens were offered the opportunity to participate. Please find a report containing details of this panel refreshment below.

• Recruitment Report 2006 (pdf 81 kb)