Longitudinal Study of Debt Advice

Description

MaPS published the results from a two-year quantitative pilot longitudinal study (PLS) of debt advice in October 2022. The pilot has demonstrated solid evidence that doing a large-scale longitudinal study successfully is feasible and likely to produce valuable insight. <br/><br/>Given the encouraging results, MaPS wants to undertake a two-phase quantitative longitudinal study to measure the impact of debt advice on client outcomes. The design includes a randomised encouragement component by using a stratified random process to create a counterfactual group, where a treatment group is encouraged to seek debt advice, and a control group is not.<br/><br/>There are two main changes from the PLS. 1) The criteria used by MaPS to define people in need of debt advice have changed. From previous surveys, we estimate that the old and new definitions of people in need of advice will provide a similar eligibility rate but that will be tested in the first phase of the study. 2) We have a new design and structure to be used for the randomise encouragement component. Also, to be tested and improved in the development phase. Lot 1: High-level objectives are the following:<br/><br/>Phase 1<br/><br/>• to successfully run the developing phase, recruit participants online in need of debt advice;<br/><br/>• create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process);<br/><br/>• evaluate the encouragement design aimed at creating a robust counterfactual group; and<br/><br/>• calibrate the key parameters (such as eligibility, attrition and response rate) for the large scale longitudinal.<br/><br/>Phase 2<br/><br/>• to successfully run a large-scale randomised encouragement design longitudinal study;<br/><br/>• create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process);<br/><br/>• successfully implement the encouragement design;<br/><br/>• to keep comparable and sizeable treatment and control groups during the duration of the project over four waves; and<br/><br/>• to measure the impact of debt advice on improving the outcomes of people.<br/><br/>Insight:<br/><br/>• 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;<br/><br/>• to identify the immediate effects of receiving debt advice, the sustainability of the solutions and the long-term consequences of clients’ decisions; and<br/><br/>• 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.