Scottish Public Opinion Monitor

The new Ipsos MORI Scottish Public Opinon monitor is designed to achieve widely dispersed and representative samples of 1,000 adults in Scotland.

The policy research team in our Edinburgh office is using the monitor to examine how experiences of public services are changing over time, and, where possible, how this is different from the picture in England. So a significant focus of the monitor is to look at use and experience of public services, and we have designed the study to allow the inclusion of short additional modules of questions from our clients. Some clients may use it to identify specific sub-groups, for example service users, for subsequent follow-on research.

There are a number of important features of the study:

• Telephone numbers are randomly generated in a way that means households are distributed in line with the population:
  • No difficulty in accessing remote rural areas, or security conscious urban tower blocks;
  • Those who choose not to be listed in telephone directories fall within our sample too;
  • While the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) filters out people who do not wish to be contacted by commercial marketing and sales companies, the genuine research that we conduct is exempted.
• Managed and conducted from our centralised location in Edinburgh, the scale of the telephone operation (around 180 interviewer computer stations) also means that surveys can be completed within a few days
• Interviewers directly enter responses to questions into a computerised system, we can monitor results at any stage, instantly.  Furthermore, where we are using questions in the monitor to establish screened samples for further research, these follow-up interviews can be conducted within hours of the initial call, to make the process relatively seamless and efficient.

The previous wave of the monitor took place in November 2009 and it will run every quarter with the next wave in February 2010.

For more information, please contact Mark Diffley. Tel: 0131 240 3269 or 0131 220 5699