Gender and Women’s Rights
Gender differences in entrepreneurial activity, including access to finance — European Parliament FEMM Committee. Research examining structural barriers to women’s enterprise across Member States.
Gender aspects of the economic downturn and financial crisis on welfare systems — European Parliament. Comparative analysis of how austerity and welfare reform affected women across Europe.
Gender aspects of the EU Youth Employment Package — European Parliament. Evaluation of how the Package addressed young women’s labour market disadvantage.
Gender balance in the media sector — European Parliament. Research on representation and decision-making across European media organisations.
Women in decision-making: the role of new media for political participation — European Parliament. Research on digital tools as a route into political life for women.
Violence Against Women
Stepping Up Against Violence Against Women and Girls in South East Asia — UN Women. Evaluation of a multi-country regional programme.
Domestic sexual abuse of girls — European Parliament. Research on prevalence, response and policy gaps.
Access to shelters for undocumented migrant women fleeing domestic violence — European Parliament. Legal and practical assessment across Member States.
Preventing the perpetration of domestic violence and abuse — Home Office. Policy development and research on what works to stop perpetration upstream.
Gender-based violence among gang-affected youth — Home Office Domestic Abuse Research Programme. Scoping study and intervention co-design.
Deployment of extended family in domestic abuse perpetrator programmes — Home Office Domestic Abuse Research Programme.
Caring Dads Cymru evaluation — Welsh Assembly Government. Impact and process evaluation of a programme for abusive and neglectful fathers.
One-to-one intervention for high-risk perpetrators of domestic abuse — Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Councils. Evaluation and development of an innovative perpetrator programme.
Rapid Evidence Assessment of domestic violence perpetrator and violence reduction education programmes — Buckinghamshire County Council.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) prevention research — Department for Education. Two evaluation projects on identifying risk and reducing harm to girls.
Long Term Agreement, FGM reduction programme — UNFPA. Evaluation partner for the global FGM reduction programme.
Reducing sexual aggression in the night-time economy — Drinkaware. Evaluation of a national behaviour-change campaign.
See also the College of Policing rapid PRISMA reviews under Workflow Engineering for Research.
Workflow Engineering for Research
A discipline at the intersection of social research and software engineering. Opcit designs and builds custom automated workflows for academic and applied research — pipelines that ingest large bodies of literature or qualitative data, structure it, interrogate it against rigorous analytic protocols, and produce transparent, citation-anchored outputs with full audit trails. The work is research infrastructure: methods rendered as code, reproducible by design, engineered to a standard that survives peer review and commissioner scrutiny.
Rapid PRISMA-aligned evidence reviews: violence against women and girls (online harm) & child sexual abuse and exploitation — College of Policing. Two systematic evidence reviews delivered through a custom Python pipeline of our own design. The workflow ingests a screened corpus of academic literature, structures it against a fixed analytic protocol, and produces thematic syntheses with every claim traceable to its source.
Reflexive AI: tracing code lineage and downstream harms in open-source AI — research developed in partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute (Prof. Bernie Hogan). A custom scrape and analysis of 1,033 open-source AI repositories and around 200,000 files, using bespoke tooling engineered for the study. The work develops “TraceSeed”, a proposed voluntary telemetry framework for reflexive AI governance — accountability designed in at the point of authorship rather than retrofitted after harm.
Workflow engineering as a service — for universities, research institutes, evaluators and policy bodies commissioning evidence reviews, scoping studies or large-scale qualitative analysis. Opcit designs, builds and documents the pipeline; the client retains the methodology and the code. Available as a standalone capability or embedded within a wider research commission.
Violence and Extremism
Reintegration and rehabilitation of returning foreign fighters — UN Office of Counter-Terrorism. Research and strategic communications development.
Impacts and risks for women and girls exposed to Boko Haram — Research on the gendered dimensions of insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin.
Evaluation of the OCTS Prevent anti-radicalisation programme — Home Office. Evaluation of a national counter-extremism programme.
See also the College of Policing rapid PRISMA review on child sexual abuse and exploitation under Workflow Engineering for Research.
Social Care
Children’s Social Care Innovation Fund (£20m) — Department for Education. Evaluation coordination across a national fund supporting innovation in children’s services.
National evaluation of the Pause programme — Department for Education. Experimental matched-control evaluation of an innovative programme to reduce the number of children taken into care from highly vulnerable mothers.
Extended childcare for children with disabilities and SEN — West London local authority. Consultation, pilot development and evaluation of a wraparound childcare scheme.
Refugee and asylum-seeker children’s home–school liaison project — London-based charity. Two-year evaluation with recommendations for future delivery.
Welcome: Working for Refugee Integration — UNHCR Italy. Ongoing. Evaluation of a labour integration and social protection programme for refugees in Italy.
Refugee Employment Platform — multi-country feasibility assessment — UNHCR and IFC. Ongoing. Feasibility assessment of a private-sector solution to refugee labour market access, covering Türkiye, Armenia, Bulgaria, Spain and a Europe-wide employer component.
Politics and Representation
Women in decision-making: the role of new media for political participation — European Parliament.
Gender balance in the media sector — European Parliament.
See also Gender and Women’s Rights.
Civil Society
Long Term Impact of The National Lottery Community Fund — National Lottery Community Fund. Population-scale research with grant holders, yielding circa 3,000 survey responses alongside qualitative and administrative data analysis.
UNHCR COVID-19 Emergency Support Package: Sahel G5 region — UNHCR. Evaluation across livelihoods, health, nutrition, social protection and WASH.
Research, Evaluation and Monitoring
Leadership Qualities Framework 360° review tool — NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement. Review and development of a leadership assessment tool, including a national e-survey, focus groups and case studies with senior NHS leaders.
Alcohol Arrest Referral national pilot evaluation — Home Office. Quasi-experimental evaluation with formative and process components across multiple pilot sites.
National focus groups on media and public perceptions of mental health — SHIFT, Department of Health. Exploratory research across nine English regions.
Evaluation of a project to reduce domestic violence and improve agency responses — Department for Education
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