Longitudinal Study of Debt Advice

No change from Contract Award Notice: High-level objectives are the following: Phase 1 • to successfully run the developing phase, recruit participants online in need of debt advice; • create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process); • evaluate the encouragement design aimed at creating a robust counterfactual group; and • calibrate the key parameters (such as eligibility, attrition and response rate) for the large scale longitudinal. Phase 2 • to successfully run a large-scale randomised encouragement design longitudinal study; • create the experimental allocation (using a stratified random process); • successfully implement the encouragement design; • to keep comparable and sizeable treatment and control groups during the duration of the project over four waves; and • to measure the impact of debt advice on improving the outcomes of people. Insight: • 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; • to identify the immediate effects of receiving debt advice, the sustainability of the solutions and the long-term consequences of clients' decisions; and • 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.