How do I use it in research or service evaluation?

Lots of personal information is written onto the Inclusion Web, but we can also do a simple count of the people and places in each life domain. To do the analysis, all the personal information stays with the individual, and just the summary numbers go forward to be combined with other people’s data and analysed. By looking at the changes over time and combining the numbers from one person with those from others, we can use statistics to analyse the results from the Inclusion Web. This will tell us whether our group of people are getting more included in the community or more isolated. The Inclusion Web can be used more than once with a particular person to find out if things are changing over time. You create the first Inclusion Web at the start, and then work together to make some changes, perhaps with the help of the Social Inclusion Training Pack. After, say, six months, you complete a second Inclusion Web. You can compare the second Web with the first Web to see if there have been any changes. If you do this with ten or more people, it is possible to use the Inclusion Web Spreadsheet to analyse the changes. The statistics embedded in the Inclusion Web Spreadsheet will automatically tell you whether there is a ‘statistically significant’ change. ​ If you use the Inclusion Web alongside other measures, you can find out if taking part in the community and having a larger relationship network contributes positively to mental and physical health, self-esteem and quality of life.

• Download the 2016 Inclusion Web Spreadsheet (nine life domains). Once you have opened the spreadsheet please ensure that you enable the security protected macros (a message will appear) and save the file to your computer.

Are any research findings available? Here are some key points from two published studies. They suggest that using the Inclusion Web to focus ideas about community involvement helps people who use services to participate in more places and build a wider network of meaningful connection with people. The following findings were based on studies involving 19 people from Oxford and 149 from Liverpool: Highly significant (p<0.001) increases in people and places on both sites between time 1 and time 2 for people completing the Inclusion Web

• Recorded ‘places’ increased by 68% in Liverpool and 84% in Oxford.
• Recorded ‘people’ increased by 66% in Liverpool and 68% in Oxford.
• Overall, people became involved in a wider range of ‘life domains’. We refer to this range as ‘clock spread’ and we found that this increased for 58% of the people involved in Liverpool and 79% in Oxford.