Police complaints, investigations and misconduct - legislation proposals: consultation analysis

3 Methodology

3.1 Data processing

At the start of the consultation analysis, the responses extracted from the Citizen Space portal, as well as the responses provided by email and post that mirrored the format of the consultation questionnaire, were merged into a single dataset. All responses were treated equally regardless of how they were submitted. During the manual review of responses, the research team screened responses for those that were part of an organised campaign or that were clearly intended as offensive, abusive or explicitly vulgar. No responses were removed as a result of this screening.

The consultation also received responses by email or post which did not follow the prescribed question format and did not always refer to specific recommendations. These responses were submitted on behalf of organisations except one which outlined the comments raised during the engagement events. Given that some of these responses could not be directly mapped to specific consultation questions or recommendations, the insights raised have been summarised and reported on separately in section 4.6 of this report. In some cases, due to the non-standard nature of these responses, some may not be accurately reflected in the breakdowns of the totals in the quantitative analysis.

3.2 Approach to analysis of open-form questions

The consultation included 56 open-format questions with free-text fields, and there was no limit to the amount of text which respondents could write in their answers. All responses to the open-text questions were read in full by our team of researchers, with thematic analysis of each response being conducted to capture the main opinions expressed by respondents in over-arching themes as well as to understand the reasoning behind answers. As part of our analysis, we also extracted any practical recommendations made by respondents relating to the design and implementation of the legislation.

Responses to the consultation differed in depth and approach, and while many responses included evidence to back up opinions, other responses primarily expressed preferences, concerns or expectations without further analysis. Our approach to handling these differences involved:

• Capturing the main idea regardless of whether it was expressed as a personal view or if evidence was provided to sustain the argument.
• Including every response in the analysis, reading beyond grammar or spelling mistakes and capturing the main idea regardless of difficulty in distilling the information.

Supplementary quotes from respondents have been used in the report to support many of the highlighted themes and views raised in response to the questions raised in this consultation. The quotes used are generally intended to be representative of themes or views raised by multiple respondents, unless otherwise stated.

3.3 Approach to analysis of closed-form questions

Descriptive analysis was conducted on the 111 closed-format questions based on the frequency at which each of the multiple-choice options were selected. The main body of the report summarises in narrative form the distribution of responses across each option. Segmentation analysis of each closed-format question is also detailed in Appendix B, broken down by if the individual is responding on behalf of themself as an individual or on behalf of an organisation, thus highlighting where responses may differ depending on the type of respondent.