Social capital and community wellbeing in Scotland

Annex E: Scottish Household Survey

The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) is an annual survey of the general population in Scotland, carried out since 1999. It aims to collect reliable and up-to-date information on the characteristics, attitudes and behaviours of Scotland’s people, using face-to-face interviewing in people’s homes.

Due to restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 surveys were carried out over the telephone, rather than face-to-face, and published as experimental statistics.

In 2022 the SHS was carried out as a face-to-face interview, with the survey published as Accredited Official Statistics for the first time since 2019. Therefore, the most recent valid comparison year is 2019.

The SHS is a random sample of people in private residences. It is a voluntary and interviewer-led survey. Around 10,500 households were interviewed for the SHS 2022 survey, between 11 March 2022 and 6 March 2023. Response rates were lower than they had been pre-pandemic (2019 and earlier). This could potentially have been accompanied by a small change in the pattern of non-response to the survey, which is discussed in more detail in the accompanying methodology report. In general, these differences are unlikely to have a significant impact on the reported results, and the 2022 results are broadly comparable to 2019 and earlier years.

Throughout this report, excel workbooks are referenced. These are published in Excel format as supporting documents to the report, and include specific results for groups in the population. Some of the differences between groups may be due to random sampling variation i.e. chance. Similarly, some apparent differences between 2018 / 2019 and 2022 results may occur by chance. We use standard statistical tests of significance to determine the likelihood of differences being due to chance. When this report refers to differences between groups or years, these differences are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level unless explicitly stated otherwise. Some differences between groups in the tables that appear large may not be mentioned in this report, because they are not statistically significant.

Full details on the methodology of the SHS can be found here.