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

2 Methodology

2.1 Data processing

The consultation received 55 responses, 33 of which came from individuals and 22 came from individuals on behalf of organisations. All responses were treated equally regardless of how they were submitted. During the manual review of responses, the research team screened responses 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.

2.2 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 a team of researchers, with thematic analysis of each response being conducted to capture the main opinions expressed by respondents as well as to understand the reasoning behind answers. This included ensuring every response was reflected in the analysis, reading beyond grammar or spelling mistakes and capturing the main ideas and themes regardless of difficulty in distilling the information. Any practical recommendations made by respondents relating to the design and implementation of the legislation were also extracted.

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

2.3 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. Quantitative analysis was conducted to determine the number of respondents selecting each option for each question, providing breakdowns on whether respondents were organisations or individuals.