Ecominds-effects-on-mental-wellbeing-evaluation-report

28 <strong>Ecominds</strong> <strong>effects</strong> on mental wellbeingto involve more than five people in the evaluation ifthey wished to do so. More details of the ‘All projects’questionnaire are covered in Section 3.5 and a copyof the questionnaire can be found in Appendix A.Each <strong>Ecominds</strong> project involved a slightly differentcontext, with varying numbers of participants,differing activities and timescales. Timings for thequestionnaire completion could therefore not bespecified exactly and had to be flexible, so were leftto the discretion of the project staff (with guidancegiven – see Section 3.3).The ‘All projects’ study comprised two separateelements which were dependent on whether theprojects had been able to ask the same people tofill out questionnaires both at the beginning andat the end of the programme or whether differentparticipants had been involved in completingquestionnaires at the two time points.3.2.1 The ‘All projects’ evaluationThe ‘All projects’ evaluation was open to all projectsexcept: i) the projects involved in the ‘In-depth’evaluation, ii) those projects being evaluated by CLESand NEF as part of the Big Lottery Fund NationalWellbeing Evaluation and iii) projects which wereparticipating in their own external evaluations; inorder to avoid project participants suffering from‘questionnaire fatigue’. In addition, projects where itwas not considered ethically appropriate to use theUniversity of Essex questionnaires were also omitted(for example where participants were deemed byproject staff to be particularly vulnerable, too youngor too traumatised and therefore not able to completethe composite questionnaires, even with assistance).Every <strong>Ecominds</strong> project was sent 10 printed copiesof the short two-page participant questionnaire bypost (and electronically by email when requested)and project staff then asked five participants atrandom in their project to complete the questionnairesat the start of their involvement with <strong>Ecominds</strong>.Completed questionnaires were then sent backto the University of Essex by Freepost. Towardsthe end of the programme project staff asked thesame five participants (if possible or five differentparticipants if not) to complete the remaining fivequestionnaires and once again the completedquestionnaires were returned to the University ofEssex for analysis. Projects were also encouragedFirstly, for projects who had managed to askbeneficiaries to complete both a start of programmequestionnaire and then another questionnaire atthe end of the programme a direct comparison ofparameters and any changes that have occurred overtime could be made on an individual basis. We havecalled this a ‘within group’ study.Secondly, for projects whose participants had eithercompleted one questionnaire at the start of theirtime at the project or one questionnaire at the end ofthe project, a comparison of the outcome measuresbetween two different groups of participants (thosewho have just started at a project and those whohave just finished) could be made and any resultingdifferences reported. We have called this a ‘betweengroups’ study.3.2.2 The ‘In-depth’ evaluationA subset of <strong>Ecominds</strong> projects were chosen togive more in-depth information on the <strong>effects</strong> onparticipant wellbeing, social inclusion and connectionto nature. The aim was to provide a representativesample of <strong>Ecominds</strong> projects to include: i) all typesof project, i.e. a mix of care farming, social andtherapeutic horticulture, environmental conservation,facilitated green exercise and nature art andcrafts projects; ii) projects both with and without aformal therapy element, iii) projects from all of thegeographic regions; iv) a range of project sizes (interms of number of beneficiaries;)and v) a variety ofdifferent grant sizes.