Scottish Social Attitudes 2019: technical report

4. Fieldwork

Fieldwork for the 2019 survey ran between August 2019 and March 2020. There was a five week pause in fieldwork during the pre-election period, with no interviews taking place between 6.11.2019 and 12.12.2019 inclusive. 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. Interviewers new to the study attended a face-to-face briefing prior to starting work on the study, while interviewers who had worked on SSA in the previous two years completed a self-briefing at home.

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 also 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.