Mitchell Institute and Australian Department of Social Services

Evaluating a Co-Designed Return to Life Application for People Receiving the Disability Support Pension

2021: This project evaluated a novel return to work application for those receiving the Disability Support Pension. This required co-design of an overall evaluation framework, and implementation of the framework including data collection, analysis, and reporting. Methods involved surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews and quantitative analyses of app-based data. Results from the evaluation are being used by the Department of Social Services to determine future behaviour-based app initiatives, and the scale-up of the Giving it a Go application.

In this project we created psychologically safe spaces by ensuring individuals and small groups were involved at all stages of design (including of focus group discussion guides, interview guides, and prototyping sessions). This ensured accessibility and inclusion were paramount and that the processes of engagement were elevated as preferences to the researchers.