Longitudinal Study of Debt Advice

No change from Contract Award Notice

High-level objectives are the following

Phase 1

• to successfully run the developing phase, recruit participants online in need of debt advice;
• create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process);
• evaluate the encouragement design aimed at creating a robust counterfactual group; and
• calibrate the key parameters (such as eligibility, attrition and response rate) for the large scale longitudinal.

Phase 2

• to successfully run a large-scale randomised encouragement design longitudinal study;
• create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process);
• successfully implement the encouragement design;
• to keep comparable and sizeable treatment and control groups during the duration of the project over four waves; and
• to measure the impact of debt advice on improving the outcomes of people.

Insight

• to understand the causality of debt advice has with debt and wider financial well-being indicators within the debt journey over the short, medium and long term. This includes analysing complex journeys into and out of debt over time and the causes;
• to identify the immediate effects of receiving debt advice, the sustainability of the solutions and the long-term consequences of clients' decisions; and
• to identify what works and what doesn't work to increase motivation for advice seeking behaviour, which is one of the most challenging objectives in the debt advice sector.