Principal Researcher, Family Income - London, United Kingdom - Nesta

Nesta

Verified Company

London, United Kingdom

2 weeks ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

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Description

We are recruiting for a Principal Researcher, Family Income - A Fairer Start:

About Nesta
We are Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society's biggest problems.

Our three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet.

For over 20 years, we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation.

We work in three roles:

as an innovation partner working with frontline organisations to design and test new solutions, as a venture builder supporting new and early stage businesses, and as a system shaper creating the conditions for innovation.

Harnessing the rigour of science and the creativity of design, we work relentlessly to change millions of lives for the better.

Find out more at

About the role

Nesta is on a 10-year endeavour to close the gap in school readiness between those born into disadvantage and the national average across the UK.

With moonshot goals, our work is ambitious - we love visionary and constraint-breaking ideas, even if they come with risk.

As Principal Researcher, your work will help us better understand how we can intervene with cash or benefits to support children born into poverty, so they can reach the level of development of their more affluent peers.

You will hold a key role in the team as we synthesise the evidence, define our strategy, sharpen our hypotheses and plan a potential large-scale cash-transfer trial.

You will report to the Programme Lead for Family Income, and work alongside a talented team with an unusual blend of skills - ranging from data analytics and behavioural science to design and communications.

This is an 8-month fixed term position, with likely opportunities for further career development.

Your responsibilities

Our lead hypothesis is that a cash-transfer trial focused around child development and parenting outcomes is necessary to better understand the relationship between family income and child development and the best ways to intervene, and we have the backing of Nesta's leadership and Board of Trustees to pursue such a trial if doing so is feasible.

However, we will be stress-testing this hypothesis over the next year, in part by learning from the existing evidence from current and past policies and benefits programmes.

As your work will play a crucial role in stress-testing this hypothesis and identifying the best work that Nesta can do, your specific objectives may evolve as we go.

In every instance, it will likely involve many of the following tasks:

Review and synthesise relevant literature from academic and nonacademic sources on the role that family income plays
Lead in designing a sufficiently powered RCT from inception; this will involve defining expected effect sizes, outcome measures, intervention design, target groups, participant sampling and incentives, and other trial design considerations
Conduct or commission analysis on data from existing or past cash transfer policies to determine the effect on child development
Advise colleagues working or commissioning related research and analysis, based on your understanding the literature and your research or methodological expertise
Help design a meaningful community engagement approach, involving people living with deprivation and raising young children in our research
Collaborate with colleagues on policy and partner engagement, helping ensure our efforts have the greatest possible impact and reach
Actively monitor and appropriately mitigate risks, and take a proactive approach to ensuring ethical research standards are consistently met
Be an active and flexible member of the team, supporting other colleagues where needed and role modelling Nesta's values

Your expertise

Essential:

Qualified to PhD level in a relevant domain or applicable methodological discipline (for example, developmental psychology, health, education, economics, statistics)
Experience designing and delivering RCTs and quasiexperiments, and conducting empirical research using quantitative or mixedmethods approaches
Ability to guide others in selecting the best approaches to answer their research questions, taking into account practical as well as methodological needs
Experience or demonstrated interest in engaging with public policy at local, national or international levels
Exceptional ability to manage and develop yourself at work; you demonstrate high levels of initiative, and take responsibility for your own workload and development
Collaborative and solutionfocused approach to problem solving
Willingness to work flexibly on topics outside of your immediate expertise
Excellent communication skills with academic and nonacademic audiences

Desirable: