Scotland's People Annual Report: Results from 2013 Scottish Household Survey: Revised October 2015

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^[140]

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.

SHS Local Authority Tables are planned for publication soon after the main SHS Annual Report. These 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 commentary, 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.

Further information available from the SHS annual publication summary pages on the SHS website^[141].

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 for 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. The last SHS Lite to be commissioned was for the 2009/2010 sweeps of the SHS. The SHS Project team may consider further developing this if user demand is high. 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.
• An 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.

Anonymised copies of the survey up to the 2007/2008 sweeps of the SHS are currently deposited with the UK Data Service website , together with supporting documentation to facilitate wider access to, and analysis of, the information gathered. The SHS Project team will be looking to commit resources in the coming year to ensuring that more recent sweeps of the SHS data are deposited with the UK Data Archive.