One of my first pieces of work as the C4 embedded researcher in Belfast was to get a handle on the research and evidence that already existed on the Market Community. I was coming into a partnership where both QCAP and the MDA had already built up a considerable amount of research, data and community evidence. Before adding anything new, it made sense to establish what was already there and bring it together in a more accessible form.
For C4, this provided a starting point for understanding the existing evidence base in the Belfast Catapult and the work that had taken place before the programme began. The material was brought together into a single repository, providing an organised record of the existing research and evidence. This involved working through material from QCAP and the MDA, recording what each piece of work covered and organising it by subject and source.
The existing MDA Community Dashboard was also useful in this process, helping to identify and bring together material relating to the Market that had already been collected and organised locally. A reference list was developed alongside the repository so that the original material could be located and returned to when needed.
Building the Evidence Base
The audit brought together a substantial amount of existing material. Publicly available QCAP work covers a range of areas in the Market. Growing Up in the Market, for example, looks at the experiences of children, young people and their families.
There has also been work around community health and wellbeing, education and skills, and the social economy and community wealth building. Alongside this is the MDA’s work across housing, health, children and young people, education and employment, community cohesion and the development of the area. Not everything fitted neatly into conventional ideas of research.
Alongside reports, evaluations and data was evidence generated through community engagement and the ongoing work of the MDA. For this reason, limiting the audit to academic research would have missed a considerable amount of what was already known about the Market. The repository needed to reflect these different sources rather than treating published or university-led research as the only evidence available.
Bringing the material together also made connections between different areas of work easier to identify. Housing, for example, connects with whether families can remain in the Market, but also with health, family life and the longer-term sustainability of the community. Work around education and employment similarly connects with existing research on children and young people growing up in the area.
The audit brought material that had previously sat across different projects and sources into one place. This provides a clearer overview of the research that has been carried out in the Market and makes it easier to locate and return to individual pieces of work when needed. It also means that earlier work remains visible and accessible as new research is developed.
Using the Evidence
The repository is more than a record of what QCAP and the MDA have produced. Having the material organised in one place means it can be returned to easily, whether to check a particular issue, locate earlier research or understand how different pieces of work relate to one another.
It also provides a useful starting point when considering new research. Rather than beginning with “What data do we need to collect?”, we can first ask “What do we already know about this?” This is particularly useful within C4, where I am building on an existing programme of community and university research rather than starting from a blank slate.
Sometimes there is already relevant research or evidence to draw on, while in other cases the existing material provides useful background and context for what comes next. Having this accessible and in one place makes it much easier to understand what has already been done and to return to the original work when a particular issue comes up.
The repository can also continue to develop as new research and evidence becomes available. This means it is not intended as a one-off audit or a finished collection of documents, but as an organised record that can be updated over the course of the programme.
For C4 in Belfast, it provides a clear record of the evidence that was already there when the programme began, while also creating a place to capture what is produced over the course of the project.
Cite this Article:
Halforty, N. (2026). Starting With What We Already Know: Building the Market Evidence Base. The Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness. https://doi.org/10.7190/c4.2026.6768071360
