About Karen's experience
Karen Kellard - Company Director, Lotus Social Research
Karen has over 20 years of experience in senior/executive roles in social research and evaluation, gained in Australia (the Social Research Centre in Melbourne), the UK (Loughborough University and BMG Research), and Saudi Arabia (National Center for Social Studies, Riyadh).
A qualitative specialist, Karen's experience includes leading research studies and evaluations for government, universities, private companies and the not-for-profit sector, as well as strategic planning, leadership and management tasks.
Karen's expertise covers all aspects of social research from design to delivery across a wide range of public and social policy areas such as employment, welfare, education, disability, health, family violence, marginalised young people and other 'at risk' groups.
Project examples
Karen has led 100s of research projects over her career - a few select examples are provided below:
- Evaluation of Regional Employment Trials
- Evaluation of Transition to Work (Australia)
- Evaluation of ParentsNext
- Evaluation of the Job Seeker Classification Instrument
- Research with victims and perpetrators of image-based abuse
- Evaluation of a transition project for young people leaving care (with ACIL Allen Consulting)
- Research to evaluate a case management approach for family violence (with Deloitte Access Economics)
- Research to inform the development of childcare subsidies for parents (with the Australian National University).
Karen has also conducted 100s of focus groups, in-depth interviews and cognitive interviews covering a broad range of subjects (such as disability, health, policing, safety, violence, drug misuse and unemployment) and engaging with a wide variety of stakeholder groups from the general public to senior policy officials.