Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2023 - Technical Report

Key Findings

In 2023, a condensed version of the Scottish Social Attitudes Core Module was run to explore potential impacts of a change in methodology from face-to-face to push-to-web. The key findings from this experimental survey are as follows:

• The SSAS 2023 provided largely similar weighted demographic data to the face-to-face surveys, while the unweighted data showed a smaller proportion of respondents aged 65+ and a larger proportion of female respondents.
• There was a marked drop in the proportion of those who identified as having a long-term health condition/disability, compared to when the survey was conducted face-to-face. If SSAS is conducted online in future consideration should be given on how to increase response among this group.
• The weighting efficiency for SSAS 2023 was 64%, which is broadly comparable with the last two years the survey was conducted face-to-face: 66% in 2019 and 70% in 2017.
• The sample is broadly comparable with face-to-face years across questions asked on politics and national identity (unfunded questions which assist with analysis of the funded attitudinal questions), indicating there has not been an adverse political bias introduced as a result of the change in mode.
• Certain questions in the Core Module had to be adapted significantly for the web design – as a consequence the ability to compare these with face-to-face results was negatively impacted.
• Though noting underrepresentation in places such as long-term health condition – overall the web methodology was found to be robust. This report therefore recommends that the web methodology could, where question wording has not been markedly adapted, be used to maintain the long-running SSAS time series into the future