Nicky McGuinness

Nicky is an experienced qualitative Senior Researcher in the Centre for Children and Families. Nicky is currently on a secondment to the Crime, Justice and Security team. She has over 15 years’ experience of qualitative approaches and fieldwork practice including expertise in conducting sensitive research with vulnerable groups. Nicky has worked on a wide variety of qualitative projects, both at NatCen and as an independent researcher, spanning policy areas including healthcare and patient experience, education and the special educational needs system, and transport policy and disabled people’s transport experiences. 

In her current role at NatCen, Nicky has worked on a range of mixed-methods and qualitative evaluations and research studies and is currently working on the COVID-19 Inquiry project, Stop and Think Evaluation, and Authoritative School Climate Enabling (ASCE) school choices scoping study and Evaluation of the Behaviour Hubs programme.

Nicky started her career in social research at ScotCen in 2006, before joining the then Qualitative Research Unit. Following a period as an independent social researcher, Nicky retrained as a midwife before returning to NatCen as a biomedical survey interviewer in 2019,  returning to research in summer 2021.