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The Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales is an independent body established by the Welsh Government to engage in a national conversation with Welsh citizens about Wales’ constitutional future. Beaufort was appointed to design and deliver a blended programme of research and engagement activity for the Commission. The project focused on gathering citizens’ views on the work of the Commission and on how the future could look for how Wales is run. The research programme included four stages:

1.    Qualitative stage 1 – eight extended deliberative discussions held face-to-face in locations across Wales. These sessions included involvement from Commission members to help with participant engagement and to encourage a collaborative process. Purposive sampling was used to encourage attendance from those whose voices are not normally heard in public consultations.

2.     Quantitative stage – representative bilingual online survey of adults in Wales. Alongside the online survey, to ensure that the quantitative stage was inclusive, we conducted a separate phone survey among those who do not have access to the internet or do not go online very frequently.  

3.     Qualitative engagement stage using a dedicated online platform to interact with participants between the first and second discussion stages. This stage was used for activities such as obtaining reactions to media topics, communications, quick polls and exploring issues raised during the first stage of discussions in more depth. It was also used to introduce participants to the key topics that would be covered in the reconvened sessions. Participants who were digitally excluded contributed via a phone interview.

4.    Qualitative stage 2 – extended deliberative discussions, reconvened with the same participants from stage1. The focus of this stage was to explore perceptions of different constitutional options. As with stage 1, there were breakout discussions to allow participants to feed back in depth as well as plenary to sum up what we had heard from the discussions. We delivered interactive face-to-face sessions with participants which included real-time polling, for example to measure how opinion changed over the course of the discussions. The findings from our reports were incorporated into the Commission’s final report.

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