Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey 2021: Technical Report

Data preparation

Data edits

The EPS questionnaire involved the collection of data that respondents can occasionally struggle to answer. Moreover, despite stringent quality control, there is a chance that interviewers may enter typing errors, for example accidentally entering extra zeros on the end of numerical variables.

As a result, some data validation needed to occur after fieldwork had finished to ensure no errors were present in the final data. Guidelines for editing the survey data can be found in Appendix .

Coding

Open ended responses to the survey were coded by IFF Research's internal coding team. To ensure consistency, a formal codeframe was developed and regularly reviewed during development by the research team. In addition, the application of the codeframe in practice was monitored through quality control checks, to ensure a high level of accuracy of codes assigned to verbatim responses.

Where respondents did not agree with the classification of their establishment, they were asked to give a description of the organisation's activities, using an approach developed by IFF over multiple surveys. The data was coded to 4-digit Standard Industrial Classification (2007), and subsequently grouped into the sector categories used for analysis and reporting.

The 2021 Scottish EPS used different sector definitions compared to the 2019 previous EPS. The previous EPS used 12 sectors for analysis, the 2021 iteration had 6. Table 12 in Appendix A shows the 6 sectors and their corresponding SIC 2007 definitions.^[5]