Strategic police priorities: consultation analysis

3. Respondent Profile and Methodology

3.1 Respondent profile

A total of seventy-one individuals and organisations were involved in the consultation exercise. Fifty-nine responses were collected via Citizen Space and twelve stakeholder meetings were attended by officials from the Scottish Government.

Respondent types and numbers from the Citizen Space platform included:

A list of the organisations who responded via Citizen Space and those involved in the stakeholder meetings has been included in the Appendix.

Note: throughout the remainder of this report, the commentary highlights key points of the respondents. Care should be taken when interpreting these findings, particularly when they are based on low numbers of respondents (as indicated in the chart above). A total of fifty-nine responses were obtained from Citizen Space and twelve from stakeholder meetings. For every question it is not possible to break down whether those responding were individuals or organisations; however, this has been done wherever possible. It should be noted that the quantitative results focused solely on the fifty-nine responses from Citizen Space. Base sizes should be taken into consideration when reviewing these quantitative results.

3.2 Methodology

3.2.1 Analysis

The Scottish Government downloaded and transferred the fifty-nine responses from Citizen Space and sent them to Pye Tait to analyse along with the notes from the twelve stakeholder meetings. These were then combined as part of the qualitative analysis. Pye Tait was also able to accommodate some late response feedback via email. 

Pye Tait analysed and coded the feedback from the consultation and the stakeholder meetings. The consultation feedback from Citizen Space focused on the six questions set out in 3.2.2, whereas the stakeholder meetings focused on gathering organisational views around the SPPs and whether they felt they met their needs.

Thematic analysis was used to analyse all the qualitative feedback. This involved looking for key themes arising in the data along with consideration of key word frequencies. Once this was complete Pye Tait separated out the key themes from the feedback under each of the individual SPPs. This will allow the Scottish Government to gain a clear understanding of respondents’ thoughts around each of them and make any required alterations to the SPPs. 

Where possible, Pye Tait distinguished between key respondent groups as part of the analysis (individual or organisation), taking care not to introduce or imply bias. Where the consultation questionnaire did not ask respondents to select from a pre-defined list of organisation categories Pye Tait defined groupings from the organisation name as far as reasonably possible (respondent type list included in section 3.1). 

In the consultation questionnaire there were three questions which made use of quantitative ‘fully/partially/not at all’ questions. Simple bar graphs were produced to depict respondents’ general feelings on these questions. It should be noted that base sizes are very small for these questions and therefore they only give a general indication of respondents’ feelings.

3.2.2 Consultation Questions

1. To what extent do the revised Strategic Police Priorities meet your expectations for what the Scottish Police Authority and the Police Service should focus on in the future: a. Fully b. Partially c. Not at all. Please provide reasons for your response.

2. Do the revised Strategic Police Priorities reflect your needs: a. Fully b. Partially c. Not at all. Please provide reasons for your response. 

3. Do the revised Strategic Police Priorities reflect the needs of your community: a. Fully b. Partially c. Not at all. Please provide reasons for your response. 

4. Do you agree that the revised Strategic Police Priorities should be in place for a period of 6 years? Please provide reasons for your response.

5. How do you think the progress towards delivering the Strategic Police Priorities should be measured?

6. Do you have any comments to make on our partial equalities impact assessment? This is available as an associated downloadable document.