Scottish Health Survey – telephone survey – August/September 2020: technical report

1.5 Fieldwork quality control and ethical clearance

1.5.1 Briefing interviewers

Experienced interviewers who had previously worked on the face-to-face SHeS were fully briefed in advance of fieldwork. The briefing covered the survey’s content and procedures in detail and key changes from the face-to-face survey were highlighted. A full set of written instructions that covered survey procedures were also provided to interviewers before starting work.

1.5.2 Checking interviewer quality

A large number of quality control measures were built into the survey at the data collection stage and thereafter, to monitor the quality of interviewer performance.

Recalls were carried out at 10% of productive households. These recalls checked with the participants that interviewers had followed the correct survey procedures when conducting the interview.

In addition to the recall procedure, the computer program used by interviewers had in-built soft checks (which can be suppressed) and hard checks (which cannot be suppressed) associated with particular interview questions. When uncommon or unlikely answers were entered, or answers outside a predetermined range, these checks were triggered and appear as a warning message on the interviewers’ laptop. The interviewer is either encouraged to double-check the entered response (a soft-check) or asked to change it (a hard-check). For example, a hard check was used to ensure that the age given in the household grid for each individual participant matched the date of birth entered and the date of the interview.

Soft-checks were similar to hard-checks, however, they could be suppressed. For example, if an interviewer entered that a participant walked for more than twelve hours a day, a message appeared asking the interviewer to check and confirm that the entry was correct. The interviewer could suppress the soft check once they had confirmed whether the entry was a mistake or not.

1.5.3 Ethical clearance

Ethical approval for the 2020 telephone survey was obtained from the Health and Care Research Ethics Committee for Wales (REC reference number: 17/WA/0371).