Research Support Service

What is the Cupp research support service?

Enquiries to the Helpdesk are facilitated through the Cupp Researcher's Group - a bank of researchers from Universities of Brighton, Sussex, and community organisations. It often is the beginning of long term mutually beneficial relationship between community organisations and the universities. 

The Researcher's Group holds regular referral meetings (usually every 6 weeks) to discuss requests for support, and assigns projects to the most suitable researcher. An enquiry, once assessed, is allocated a specific amount of one-to-one support from a senior researcher (anything from one to five sessions).

Since 2007, the Researcher's Group has broadened to include a senior community practitioner in family welfare (the Director of a local charity) who brings a wealth of applied experience and increasingly research experience through involvement with Cupp.

Some examples of the kinds of work the Helpdesk facilitates include:

• Supporting different organisations to carry out detailed evaluations of the impact of their own work to a level requested by their funders;
• Compiling evidence of residents’ priorities in a community needs survey;
• Developing an evaluation questionnaire for use at a range of different events, which helped build links with other interest groups.

Who is it aimed at?

The service is available to all community and voluntary organisations based in Sussex.
It is aimed at:

• organisations that have ideas for research but require guidance to get the process underway
• organisations that are conducting research but require guidance to review their methods/tools
• organisations interested in developing research partnerships with the University of Brighton

Research partnerships

Each member of the group is a specialist in a particular subject area and we are keen to establish partnerships between CVOs and Cupp researchers. We are particularly interested in hearing from people working or researching in the following areas:

• Environment: social and environmental issues affecting the quality of life of local communities, including recreation, tourism, mobility, sport and local economies
• Access to information technology (IT): problems of unequal access and ‘digital exclusion’, IT training and community development
• Housing: the effects of poor housing & poverty on health, inequalities & disadvantage
• Lifelong learning: inclusion, skills and lifelong learning
• Community needs: community development and working with communities of interest
• Health & social care: social exclusion, social services, workforce in health & social care, disability, evaluation of service provision

In addition, we would like to hear from organisations who are interested in developing participatory approaches to research such as user involvement, looking at client-practitioner relationships, partnership working and evaluation.

Get in touch

For more information or to register for the helpdesk, contact

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Telephone: (01273) 64 3004

Or use our online enquiry form