Student Finance and Wellbeing Study (SFWS) Scotland 2023-2024: technical report

4. Survey data checking, coding and editing

Data checking

Checks in the survey questionnaire program helped to limit the number of data discrepancies. Within the program, each numeric answer was given a set range of possible answers. This allowed only potentially valid answers. For example, if the maximum amount of Care Experienced Student Bursary received by a student is £9,000, this would be the upper limit of the range within a question asking about this bursary. Interim data were inspected by researchers from ScotCen to ensure that the questionnaire routing was working correctly and that all questions had valid data.

Coding and editing of data

A data processing team carried out the coding and editing of questionnaires. Data coding was necessary to enable the analysis of information collected by verbatim answers.

Factsheets were used to assist coding and editing of the data. These provided a summary of a productive interview and alerted editors to possible errors or inconsistencies that needed to be dealt with.

Code frames used in editing were developed by the researchers based in part on those used for the England and Wales 2021-2022 SIES. Where no previous list existed, researchers inspected question responses from the first completed interviews. Any complex editing decision was referred to the researchers for adjudication. These cases were documented, and instructions relayed to the data processing team.

Summary measures of income, expenditure, debt and savings

Within the report the majority of monetary figures from the survey refer to the total amounts of money spent, received or owed over the whole academic year. However in the questionnaire, students were offered the option to record these monetary amounts by week, fortnight, month, term, academic year or over the whole calendar year in order for them to provide accurate figures as far as possible. It was therefore necessary to create summary derived variables to provide a figure for the amount of money spent or received by each student over the full academic year. In creating these summary derived variables, the assumption was made that answers given in the questionnaire represented an average week/month/term etc. Details of how specific derived variables were derived can be found in the Appendices to this technical report (see separate document). The length of the academic year was assumed to be 39 weeks. The England and Wales SIES also used 39 weeks.