Methodology

The purpose of the survey is to provide all of our clients (both in the academic / political fields of Social Sciences, Economics and Demographics, or the commercial world of Marketing, Journalism and Consumer Sciences) with key topical information about the Population of Great Britain.

To do this we conduct 6,000 to 8,000 face-to-face interviews with fully representative samples of the adult population every month. This provides the most up to date and robust understanding of the population currently available. (A subset of 1,000 of these interviews forms The British Marketing Survey)

The British Population Survey then supplies the data in a fully analysable form. This means that you can not only look at the headline figures but delve into them to fully understand the detail.

Data Collection

There are many ways to collect data with telephone interviews and web-based surveys currently proving extremely popular. While these methodologies are extremely fast, efficient and cost effective, they are nevertheless not ideal for everything.

We believe that when we are looking at the fundamental details of people's lives, it is not sufficient to utilise methodologies that are incapable of verifying these details in any way. At the very basic level, it is impossible to be certain who is actually answering the questions in a web based, postal or telephone survey. It is also impossible to verify any of the answers they give, even to such basic questions as Age or even Gender.

Great Britain or United Kingdom?

We use the title British for the survey to describe the area in which we collect data. So, the survey is representative of Great Britain at a regional level and can be used to look at individual regions. However, when looking at any analysis for the whole of Great Britain it is reasonable to assume that the figures for The United Kingdom will have the same confidence level. The variance which would result from any differences that come from Northern Ireland would be so diluted as to be insignificant when applied to the UK as a whole. This is the same approach to non surveyed areas as used by The Office for National Statistics.

Face to Face

We use the services of a trained field force of interviewers who conduct the interviews face to face, in the respondents own home, where much of the key information gathered can be personally verified. For The British Marketing Survey, gathering information about marketing channels by using one of the channels to collect the data would have, inevitably, led to a skew in the data

(That's not to claim that the interviewers are specifically trained to identify 'Jedi Knights', but we have never had anyone claim that during one of our interviews - unlike the official census!)

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August 2010.

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