Scottish Social Attitudes 2023

About the study

Since 1999, Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) has been tracking the views and opinions of people’s social, political and moral attitudes in Scotland. Every year, members of the Scottish public are invited to take part and share their views on a range of topics such as work, equalities, welfare, health and how the country is run. Households are randomly selected from across Scotland to take part in the study to get a truly unbiased picture of attitudes in Scotland. 

The 2023 wave of the Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) survey was run as a push-to-web survey for the first time in its history. From 1999 to 2019 it was run as a face-to-face survey and then a telephone survey in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this report was to analyse the impact of changing the mode of SSA from face-to-face interviewing to a push-to-web methodology.

Findings

In 2023, a condensed version of the SSA Core Module was run to explore potential impacts of a change in methodology from face-to-face to push-to-web. The key findings from this experimental survey are as follows: 

• The SSA 2023 provided largely similar weighted demographic data to the face-to-face surveys.
• The unweighted data showed a smaller proportion of respondents aged 65+ and a larger proportion of female respondents.
• There was a marked drop in the proportion of those who identified as having a long-term health condition/disability, compared to when the survey was conducted face-to-face.
• The weighting efficiency for SSA 2023 was 64%, which is broadly comparable with the last two years the survey was conducted face-to-face: 66% in 2019 and 70% in 2017.
• The sample is broadly comparable with face-to-face years across questions asked on politics and national identity (unfunded questions which assist with analysis of the funded attitudinal questions), indicating there has not been an adverse political bias introduced as a result of the change in mode. 
• Certain questions in the Core Module had to be adapted significantly for the web design – as a consequence the ability to compare these with face-to-face results was negatively impacted.
• Though noting underrepresentation in places such as long-term health condition – overall the web methodology was found to be robust. This report therefore recommends that the web methodology could, where question wording has not been markedly adapted, be used to maintain the long-running SSA time series into the future.