Scottish Cancer Patient Experience Survey 2015-16: technical report

Data entry and fieldwork quality control

Data entry and coding

The contractor was responsible for data entry and quality assurance of data collected during the survey.

With the exception of questions which allowed respondents to provide written comments, the Scottish Cancer Patient Experience Survey contained predefined answer options for respondents to tick as appropriate. Answer options corresponded to codes which were entered into the data file to indicate which answer had been selected by respondents for each question. A copy of the questionnaire is in Appendix A.

The contractor was also required to record responses where a patient answered a routing question and then continued to answer subsequent questions contrary to the routing instructions within the original routing question.

For questions where a written comment could be provided, guidance was agreed with contractors on how to handle these answers ( Appendix E).

Data file processing

Once data had been collected, the contractor was able to establish a raw final data file containing all survey information including routing errors.

Once the raw data file had been developed by the contractor, the file was transferred to ISD to carry out analysis.

Quality assurance processes

Throughout the data entry process and prior to the data file being sent to ISD, the contractor was required to undertake data checks on data entered into the final data file.

Checks were made by two team members checking every tenth record to ensure that what was contained within the respondent's completed version of the survey was verified against what had been entered within the data files.