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

Footnotes

1. Higher and Further Education Students' Income, Expenditure and Debt in Scotland 2007-08 — University of Strathclyde

2. National Union of Students (NUS) Scotland (2022) Broke: How Scotland is failing its students, see BROKE (nationbuilder.com)

3. After cleaning the data, the study level of 20 students could not be determined, but these respondents provided adequate data across the survey so were kept in the overall achieved sample dataset.

4. Area deprivation on SFWS 2023-2024 is measured using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) 2020 divided into 5 quintiles from most to least deprived. SIMD 2020 measures the level of deprivation across Scotland – from the least deprived to the most deprived areas. It is based on 38 indicators in seven domains of: income, employment, health, education skills and training, housing, geographic access and crime.

5. Screening questions at the beginning of the survey determined eligibility and any respondents that were ineligible were routed away from the survey and explained that they are not eligible to take part in this survey and thanking them for their time.

6. Productive interviews include 30 partially productive responses where the student had completed at least up to the end of Section 9 of the survey on ‘Financial well-being’. The remaining 2407 productive responses were full completions.

7. As institutions recruited the sample, according to the protocol set out, ScotCen did not have access to any further detail on the number of students who did not take part including any that may have responded to the invitation sent by their institution asking not to be contacted with any further emails about the study. There were 21 cases that had completed the survey that could not be included in the analysis as their level of study (FE/undergraduate/postgraduate) could not be determined. These 21 have been included in this non-response figure.

8. The design effect, often called deff, quantifies the extent to which the expected sampling error in a survey departs from the sampling error that can be expected under simple random sampling. The design effect increases for more complex sample designs and when weighting adjustments are applied to the final results of the survey.

[i]. 2021/22 Higher Education Student Statistics published by HESA for the UK.

[ii]. Publications by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) since 2018.