Alcohol - minimum unit pricing: public attitudes research

Methodology

This survey was conducted via the Ipsos Mori Knowledge Panel. It has 25,000 panellists, of which 3,000 are in Scotland, who are recruited using off-line random probability unclustered address-based sampling. This means that every household in the UK has a known chance of being selected to join the panel. People who lack digital access are able to register to the Knowledge Panel either by post or by telephone, and are given a tablet, email address, and basic internet access to allow them to participate online.

The survey was conducted between 13^th-19^th July 2023. A total of 1,818 respondents from the Panel were selected and invited to take part in the survey, of which 1,029 responses were achieved amongst residents across Scotland aged 18+, representing a response rate of 57%.

In order to ensure the survey results are as representative of the target population as possible, the weighting was applied to the data in line with the target sample profile (Annex A).

The questions asked in the survey to asses levels of and reasons for support or opposition to MUP were the same that were asked in previous attitudinal research on MUP, and are set out in Annex B. However, it is crucial to note that this research is not comparable to previous public attitudes towards MUP research. Previous work, carried out through the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, generally had larger sample sizes, with the exception of the 2019 wave (1,497 in 2013, 1,288 in 2015, and 1,022 in 2019) and was also carried out face-to-face. As described above, this work had a sample size of 1,029 and was carried out online. The Scottish Social Attitudes Survey used clustered random probability sampling to recruit survey respondents, while Ipsos Mori invites people to join an online survey panel through unclustered random probability sampling, and survey respondents are then chosen from the existing panel. The Scottish Social Attitudes Survey also conducts fieldwork over a much longer period of time (June-October 2013, July 2015-January 2016, August 2019-March 2020 respectively) compared to this panel survey, which only ran over one week (13^th-19^th July 2023). Therefore, there was much greater scope in this new work for people's attitudes toward MUP to be influenced by current events or media coverage, or for responses to be impacted by a seasonal bias compared to previous work. As the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey is carried out over several months, from summer to winter, the risk for these biases and their impact on findings is significantly smaller. The findings set out in this report should be interpreted with these considerations in mind, and comparisons should not be made with previous public attitudes to MUP.

Data collected through the survey was broken down by a number of socio-demographic and attitudinal cross-tabulations, and significance testing was carried out at the 95% confidence level.