Student experiences of financial support in summer 2021: insights

Annex A: Methodological note

To gather the views of HE and FE students in Scotland, an online questionnaire was published using the survey tool Questback (Questback is an online survey tool which the Scottish Government holds a license to use. This system allows for the creation of online surveys and questionnaires). This is a GDPR compliant platform, which allowed us to follow all the legal data protection requirements when conducting the survey. Furthermore, no personal or identifiable data was collected in the survey, and advice on the survey content and presentation was sought from both data protection colleagues in the Scottish Government and partner agencies.

The questionnaire was hosted on the Student Information Scotland website and the link was publicised by stakeholders and partner agencies using online channels including Twitter and Facebook. The online survey launched on 8^th December 2021 and students were given over five weeks to respond (until midnight on 14^th January 2022). The survey included a total of 11 questions, all of which derived quantitative answers with the exception of one question which offered a response option 'other' as an open text box. The questionnaire was tested internally for accuracy of questions and response options prior to distribution.

Responses to the questionnaire were collated and analysed by Scottish Government analysts in Advanced Learning and Skills Analysis Unit using the software Questback. The quantitative data were also analysed and quality assured using Excel. Thematic analysis was also conducted on the qualitative data. Thematic analysis is a data analysis technique used on qualitative data (e.g. interviews, open text questions) which allows the researcher to explore themes in the data.

In total 885 responses were received to the online survey. However, following their responses to the opening screening question noted below, around 14% of respondents were not eligible to answer the entire questionnaire (i.e. they were not a student who was permanently based in Scotland or studying an FE or HE course in Scotland). This resulted in 759 valid responses. Upon further assessment of the data, one other participant was excluded from the analysis as there were no data points for any of the following questions in the survey (i.e., no questions were answered by this respondent). As such, a total of 127 participants were excluded from the initial data set and a total sample of 758 responses were analysed in this report. All missing data was quality assured and are estimated to be missing at random (i.e., no pattern was found when exploring the missing values).

Limitations

As this was a self-selecting online survey of students choosing to respond to the online questionnaire, the results cannot be generalised to, and are not representative, of all FE and HE students in Scotland. However, the findings do provide an indication of the views of responding students with regards to their experiences and perceptions of financial support over the summer months of 2021.

Cross-tab analysis has been carried out looking at the responses provided by study level, i.e. looking at responses provided by FE students at college, HE students at college, degree level students at university and postgraduate students at university. While this allows us to look at the spread and themes of responses for each different study level, it does not tell us whether the differences between the different types of students (FE and HE) are statistically significant. Statistical tests were not conducted on the data.