Table 1.

Data collection for Prevention Centre evaluation

Method	Period	Objective	Data collection details	Analysis
1. Interviews with the Centre’s chief investigators and funding partners	January–March 2016	To explore experiences of involvement, perceptions about the Centre’s functioning and achievements, and areas for improvement	Semi-structured interviews with chief investigators (n = 21/31, including researchers and policy-makers) and funding partners (n = 5/5) named on the original grant; a total of 26 participants	Thematic analysis informed by research questions and guiding conceptual constructs on collaboration [43, 44]; NVivo 11 qualitative data management software [45] was used to support coding and analysis
2. Interviews with members of the Centre’s research network	July–August 2017		Semi-structured interviews with a representative purposive sample (selected by role and career stage) of PhD students, research officers/fellows and project leads, i.e. people involved in Centre research but not named on the original grant (n = 19); this was approximately 1/3 of the research network at that time
3. Interviews with policy partners	June–July 2018		Semi-structured interviews with policy-makers (n = 18) who self-nominated for follow-up having completed a brief online survey about engagement with the Centre; the survey was advertised on the Centre website and via the Centre newsletter; one policy-maker was excluded from interviews because they had recently taken a paid role with the Centre All interviewees gave informed consent; interviews were audio recorded, professionally transcribed and then checked for errors by the interviewers
4. Partnership survey (a cross-sectional anonymous online survey)	June 2015 October 2016 August 2018	To explore the Centre’s functioning according to partners (policy-makers, practitioners, researchers) and Centre staff; the survey covers perceptions of leadership, governance, resource allocation, collaboration and engagement	All Centre partners were invited to participate via personal email; survey hyperlinks were included in Centre e-newsletters and on its website; survey statements relating to aspects of the partnership were scored on a 7-point Likert scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’; participants were also asked to rate specified experiences of partnership and comment on what worked well and what might be improved; the baseline survey was completed by 50 people, follow-up 1 was completed by 97 and follow-up 2 by 59 people	Statistical analysis of closed questions by wave of survey and thematic categorisation of open-ended questions; further details about the analysis of survey data are provided in Additional file 4
5. Participant feedback on ‘systems thinking’ workshops	Routinely collected after each event since February 2017	To elicit participants’ views of the functioning and value of events	Structured anonymous feedback forms completed by event attendees, including Centre partners and any other stakeholders who attended (n = 173 of approximately 230 attendees)	Descriptive statistical analysis and thematic categorisation of open-ended questions
6. Routine process data about Centre activities, funding and growth	Continual	To record Centre inputs, reach and outputs, including how strategies are being implemented and any impacts	Collation of data from project reports, communication products/website access data, project outputs, meeting minutes, the Centre’s partner database, ‘feedback register’ and key performance indicators	Thematic categorisation of text data and descriptive analysis of quantitative data