I just wanted to share with you a piece of research that I have done with Dr Caroline Potter from the Primary Care Department at Oxford University, where we used physical Moodscope cards to measure the impact of a community-based activity on health and wellbeing.

I am a long-term member of Moodscope and someone who has occasionally written blogs here under a pseudonym. A few years back I approached the Moodscope team asking if they had ever thought of doing physical cards for people who don’t like being online. They hadn’t and weren’t intending to, but they sent me their demo cards from the early days and I thought about how to use them.

In 2020 I was running an upcycling social enterprise and wondering how I could show the impact of the activities I was running with data not just verbal feedback. Moodscope cards are very good at generating scores which can be turned into data. I started using the cards at the beginning and end of a couple of upcycling sessions and one-to-one with people; in part to assess their moods coming into the room, but also to see how what we were doing was affecting them.

At the same time I was working as a Patient and Public Involvement advocate (PPI) with the Applied Research Collaboration for Oxford and Thames Valley (ARC OxTV) - basically I am a member of the public that gives feedback on research projects. Through that I met Caroline and together we devised a small-scale project to test whether the cards were a good way of capturing data on mood and wellbeing that small charities could then use to demonstrate the impact of their work in data format for potential funders and other interested parties.

It took two years to get funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) through the ARC. We worked with a charity with whom I’d run upcycling classes, Children Heard and Seen. They devised six arts sessions for four adult carers of children who had a parent in prison. We then collated the responses of the four adult carers pre and post session. Overall, we discovered that mood scores had improved in 3/4 of the respondents and through interviews discovered why the fourth participant’s scores had barely moved. The findings can be found here: https://www.arc-oxtv.nihr.ac.uk/research/TestingMoodscope.

To find out more about how the project came about, please go to the following link: https://www.arc-oxtv.nihr.ac.uk/blog/mary-zacaroli-expert-by-experience-arc-oxtv-part-2.

A further small-scale project trialling Moodscope cards in a different setting is in development at Oxford University and we hope more opportunities will arise to do larger scale projects as we publicise our findings. If it’s something you’d be interested in being involved in, then please drop me a line at moodscopeproject@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, drop a line in the comments if you’ve had your own ideas on where Moodscope could be of use or let us know how Moodscope scores have helped you in your life or work. As Moodscope is a balance of positive and negative, feel free to write about barriers to its use and how it could be improved too.

Mary Z

A Moodscope member