Ruth Townend

Ruth joined Brook Lyndhurst as a researcher in March 2009, bringing experience of community outreach from several years in the charity sector. Prior to this she studied Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. For her undergraduate dissertation she conducted three months of ethnographic research amongst street children in Mozambique.

Ruth’s training in social research, combined with on-the-ground experience of affecting attitudes and behaviour change, have been brought to bear across a broad spectrum of projects in her time at Brook Lyndhurst. She is an Affiliate Member of the Market Research Society, and a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Key areas of work for Brook Lyndhurst include:

Date labels and storage guidance
Ruth project managed our exploratory 'clustering' of consumers with respect to their date and/or storage guidance attitudes and behaviours, in Consumer insight: date labels and storage guidance for WRAP. Our 2011 Retail survey, also for WRAP, charted the current landscape of such labeling amongst major retailers. Ruth co-managed this project and designed the coding frame through which data was recorded.

Large scale quantitative research
Ruth is experienced in designing and working with large datasets. She designed a user interface, Excel and SPSS databases to collect and analyse data on over 10,000 supermarket products for our 2011 Retail survey. The database generated from this research is currently being used in Supporting change in the retail environment, in partnership with ADAS. Ruth also enjoyed thoroughly interrogating a dataset of over 4,000 adverts in Excel and in SPSS for our examination of Green claims in marketing for Defra (2009). 

Evaluation of community-facing projects
Ruth is lead researcher on our Evaluation of the Zero Waste Scotland Volunteer Network, a programme which seeks to empower Scottish communities to move towards a zero waste society. A synthesis of qualitative and quantitative data will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of face-to-face engagement by the network.

Our Review of the Scottish Climate Challenge Fund had Ruth travelling from Dumfries to the Shetland Isles to interview project managers and participants about their experiences of the fund, as well as conducting focus groups in Leith and Sterling. She also interviewed project managers as part of our Evaluation of NESTA’s Big Green Challenge Plus, and carried out a series of (less windswept) telephone interviews with advisors and stakeholders in WRAP’s Waste Reduction Advisor scheme.

Ruth drafted the evaluation handbook used by projects in Defra’s Greener Living Fund.

Green claims in advertising
Ruth worked on two projects, for Defra, which examine the types of ‘green’ claims being made by advertisers. The first analysed the landscape of green advertising over the last four years, while the second took a closer look at terminology, investigating consumer understanding of green terms through a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research, including discussion groups.