Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey 2021: Technical Report

Introduction

The Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey (EPS) 2021 is a large-scale telephone survey of employers in Scotland, which provides labour market information on how employers engage with the skills system in Scotland, including:

1. their recruitment of new staff;

2. their perceptions of new recruits (including young people and education leavers);

3. their engagement with training providers; and

4. their offering of work placements and apprenticeships.

The 2021 survey comprised 1,000 interviews with employers between November and December 2021. It is the first in the series to be undertaken since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and since the UK's formal departure from the European Union. The publication of the 2021 Scottish EPS is the second after a longstanding UK-wide EPS series which was conducted biennially from 2010 to 2016. The previous Scottish EPS was undertaken in 2019.

This technical report provides background information on the methodology used for carrying out the Scottish EPS. It is divided into six chapters, each considering a different area of survey design and methodology in detail:

1. Sample design: detailing the method by which employers were selected to take part in the research, including the setting of quota targets and sample volumes;

2. Questionnaire design: detailing the considerations taken into account in the design of the questionnaire, including changes to the previous wave of EPS;

3. Fieldwork: providing a detailed overview of how the interviews were carried out, quality control procedures, and the levels of response achieved;

4. Data preparation: outlining the process for editing data and coding verbatim responses collected in the survey;

5. Weighting: detailing how the survey responses were processed to ensure that the resulting dataset was representative of the population of businesses in Scotland; and

6. Using the data: considering the reliability and margins of statistical error of figures produced from the dataset.