Scottish Household Survey 2024 questionnaire review

Background

In advance of the 2024 Scottish Household Survey, a questionnaire review was carried out, with the aim of shortening the interview from 1 hour to 45 minutes.

Social surveys are increasingly costly to run. It has become more difficult to persuading people to take part, which increases the interviewer time needed to achieve target numbers of completed surveys.

Reducing the questionnaire length also helps in the following ways:

• Minimising respondent burden, in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics.
• Increases the likelihood of respondents giving valid and reliable answers. Long surveys increase the risk of respondents not giving their full attention, and looking for ways to minimise the survey length (e.g. by giving a very quick rather than a considered response, or by answering questions in a way that they think will not lead to a follow up questions).
• Is likely to have a positive impact on response rates, to ensure we are getting a representative picture of Scotland’s population.
• Makes any potential future shift to alternative modes of data collection easier. Telephone surveys generally need to be shorter than face to face surveys, and online surveys need to be shorter still.

Methods

The following principles were applied:

• Annual questions were changed to biennial, unless they are:
  • Scottish Surveys Core Questions.
  • Travel diary questions needed for transport models.
  • Needed for reporting that pools data across survey years to achieve a sufficient sample size. For example, the Local Government Benchmarking Framework and performance monitoring against statutory fuel poverty targets both pool data across several years to provide robust information at local authority level.
  • Needed for reporting against high priority National Performance Framework indicators on the quality of public services, social capital and access to green and blue space.
• Questions were removed if the information they provide can be obtained from other sources.
• Questions were removed if their usefulness for informing policy decisions was not demonstrated.

Outcome

144 questions were removed from the questionnaire, and 76 were changed from annual to biennial. Details are provided in the annex.

Scottish Household Survey 2024 questionnaire review - Annex

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