Scottish Surveys Core Questions 2022

1.6 Accounting for Mode Effect

Questions on mental wellbeing, sexual orientation, trans history and status, and veteran status are included in a self-completion questionnaire in the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS), whereas these questions are asked by an interviewer in the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) and the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS). Not all respondents to the interviewer-administered element of the SHeS go on to answer questions in the self-completion element.

From SSCQ 2022, data analysis of the pooled SSCQ questions on mental wellbeing, sexual orientation and veteran status will align with the data analysis method employed by the SHeS, where prevalence rates are based on those respondents that answered each question. Previously, the SSCQ approach was to pool the data by taking account of the missing responses, but not adjusting for them, e.g. percentage yes = (number yes / (number yes + number no + number refused or missing)) x 100). This meant that for the questions included on the self-completion questionnaire in the SHeS, the response percentages were lower than for the interviewer-led questions in the SHS and SCJS. This in turn resulted in smaller pooled SSCQ numbers when combining the responses from the three surveys.

While the change in data analysis means that the data are now more comparable to those published in the SHeS, it also means that caution should be exercised when comparing sexual orientation with previously published SSCQ data. Caution should also be exercised when comparing mental wellbeing figures with previous years; but as this is an average score of those responding, we would not expect this to be as impacted by the change in methodology. This is the first time veteran data has been included in the SSCQ analysis.