Scottish Social Attitudes 2015: Technical Report

3. Fieldwork

3.1 Fieldwork for the 2015 survey ran between July 2015 and January 2016, with 84% of interviews completed by the end of October 2015 and 95% by the end of November 2015. An advance postcard, followed by an advance letter, was sent to all sampled addresses and followed up by a personal visit from a ScotCen interviewer. Interviewers were required to make a minimum of 6 calls at different times of the day (including at least one evening and one weekend call) in order to try and contact respondents. All interviewers who were either new to the study or had previously only worked on it once before attended a one day briefing conference prior to starting work on the study. More experienced interviewers completed a self-briefing at home.

3.2 Interviews were conducted using face-to-face computer-assisted interviewing (a process which involves the use of a laptop computer, with questions appearing on screen and interviewers directly entering respondents' answers into the computer). All respondents were asked to fill in a self-completion questionnaire using the interviewer's laptop. If the respondent preferred, the questions could be read out by the interviewer. Table 1 summarises the response rate and the numbers completing the self-completion section in 2015.