Scotland's People Annual Report: Results from 2012 Scottish Household Survey

Annex 5 SHS Dissemination and Reporting

Key Findings and Reports

Results are reported in a series of annual reports, topic reports and other Scottish government publications which can be found on the survey's website^[110].

The annual report is designed to act as an introduction to the survey and to present and interpret some of the key policy-relevant results at a national level. A series of Web Tables are published in support of the annual report, providing more detailed analysis and further disaggregations of data, including some sub-national estimates.

The SHS Local Authority Tables present all the tables and charts from the annual report, where appropriate, for each local authority. Results are presented in the format of tables and charts, without narrative, showing the results separately for each local authority alongside comparisons against the national average. These are available either through an interactive Excel workbook or as standalone PDF documents for each local authority.

The SHS Interactive Mapping tool provides time-series analysis from the survey for key measures across all local authorities in Scotland. The user is able to select the measure of interest including ones such as neighbourhood rating, car availability and provision of unpaid care. All relevant analysis for the measure selected is displayed as a time-series in an accompanying chart along with a thematic map showing differences in estimates between all local authorities. Relevant metadata is also built in to the system to offer contextual information, as well as additional notes on the questions or variables used in the survey.

Further information available from the SHS annual publication summary pages on the SHS website^[111].

Microdata Access

To stimulate use of SHS data, particularly amongst local authorities, a number of data access procedures have been in place to allow access to detailed information.

• Follow-up surveys provide opportunities to researchers to use the SHS to identify a sample for follow-up research. This may allow more detailed probing of certain sub-groups or variables of interest, and to examine under-lying issues within the data.
• Similarly, a request to be provided with a special dataset can be submitted where the standard publicly available and anonymised datasets does not contain all the information researchers require. This should allow users to undertake more detailed analyses for a specific project.
• A simplified version of the full survey data is available, called SHS Lite. This dataset incorporates a significant reduction in the number of variables, complex data loops removed and replaced with summarised variables, with variables organised into 'sets' of related variables..
• A ad-hoc request service is also available allowing requests for analysis to be submitted to the SHS Project Team.

For information on how to access SHS data please see the Data Access page on the SHS website^[112].

Anonymised copies of the survey are deposited with the UK Data Service website^[113] after each biennial survey completion, together with supporting documentation to facilitate wider access to, and analysis of, the information gathered.