Testing Moodscope in community support settings

When a parent goes to prison, the whole family serves the sentence. Charities like Children Heard and Seen (CHAS) support these families – but demonstrating the difference they make is hard. Standard outcome questionnaires can feel clinical and alienating, especially for people whose experience of formal services has been difficult. The result: organisations doing vital work struggle to prove it.

It took someone outside academia to see a way through. Mary Zacaroli, a Patient and Public Involvement Champion with ARC OxTV, recognised that Moodscope – a validated mood-tracking tool available as a set of simple, tactile physical cards – could offer a more human way to capture evidence of impact. What followed was a rare example of research not merely informed by public involvement, but conceived and led by a member of the public from start to finish.

Our approach and partners

Mary Zacaroli co-designed and co-led every stage of this project alongside Dr Caroline Potter from the University of Oxford's Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. Together, they secured funding and partnered with CHAS to design a series of art sessions for family carers – parents and grandparents of children affected by parental imprisonment.

Two CHAS support workers shaped the research plan, advising on data collection during sessions and ensuring follow-up interview questions were safe and inclusive. Family carers used the Moodscope cards – 20 cards representing positive and negative mood states – at the start and end of each art session, rating their feelings before and after.

The approach worked precisely because it was designed by people closer to the problem than most researchers get. Trust between participants and the research team, and the availability of after-care support from CHAS staff, proved critical enablers.

What we found – and why it matters

1. The cards worked in practice. Four family carers used Moodscope across the art sessions. They found the cards easy to use, accessible, and – crucially – engaging rather than off-putting.
2. Participants spotted positive feelings they might otherwise have missed. Even when overall mood was low, the card-sorting process helped people recognise the presence of positive mood states – a finding with implications for wellbeing support as well as measurement.
3. Mood scores improved over each session. Most participants showed a consistent positive shift between the start and end of sessions.
4. Charity staff saw potential for ongoing use. Participants and staff thought Moodscope could serve as a quantitative monitoring tool, complementing the qualitative feedback charities already collect, to better demonstrate organisational impact.
5. Practical challenges emerged. The main barrier was the additional time and focus that charity staff needed to collect Moodscope data while running session activities – an important consideration for any future rollout.

Events outside the sessions can strongly affect mood, which complicates interpretation of individual scores. This is a known limitation of any session-level measure, but the pattern of improvement across sessions was consistent.

What this means

This project demonstrated two things at once. First, a practical one: the Moodscope cards offer a simple, low-cost way for community organisations to gather meaningful outcome data without resorting to questionnaires that can feel exclusionary. The clear, adaptable language on the cards also supports use with people who have limited English proficiency – an important advantage in diverse communities.

Second, a methodological one: research conceived and led by a public partner, drawing on complementary strengths of lived experience and academic expertise, can reach populations and generate insights that conventional research designs may miss. This model of genuine public leadership – not consultation, not involvement, but co-leadership – deserves wider adoption.

What needs to happen next

This was a small feasibility study. Further testing is needed with different populations, different activities, and in one-to-one as well as group settings. Researchers and practitioners need to explore how neurodiverse people engage with the cards, and what training charity staff require to use Moodscope on an ongoing basis.

The bigger opportunity is twofold. Integrating the card-based approach with Moodscope's online platform could enable longitudinal mood tracking and data aggregation – building a richer evidence base for the community sector over time. And embedding public-led research models like this one into standard practice could transform how the third sector generates and uses evidence, in NHS-adjacent services and beyond.