Violence against women and girls funding review: analysis of responses
Analysis of the responses to the Strategic Review of Funding and Commissioning of Violence Against Women and Girls Services call for evidence.
Overview of methods
Call for evidence structure and format
The Scottish Government's call for evidence on the Independent Strategic Review of Funding and Commissioning of VAWG services was hosted on its Citizen Space portal and consisted of 6 closed-ended and 22 open-ended free-text questions (in addition to 4 background and demographics questions). Respondents were able to indicate whether they were responding as an individual or on behalf of an organisation and, where relevant, the type of organisation.
An easy-read version of the call for evidence was also published. Responses could be submitted via the Scottish Government's online platform Citizen Space, by e-mail to a dedicated inbox or by post. A full list of the call for evidence questions is included in Annex A.
Data cleaning
Responses from Citizen Space and those sent by e-mail were merged into a single, anonymised and final dataset. Responses received by e-mail were reviewed, entered manually into the final dataset and analysed alongside responses submitted through the online platform. Finally, notes from 7 roundtable events were reviewed and analysed. All responses were treated equally.
Offensive responses
During the manual review of responses, the research team screened responses to identify those that were clearly intended as offensive, abusive or explicitly vulgar. No responses were removed as a result of this screening.
Respondent type
Fourteen respondents selected "individual" to the question "Are you responding as an individual or an organisation?" but also answered the set of questions about organisations (organisation sector and name). The research team analysed the text in these responses and concluded that the responses reflect the views of individuals, not the views of an organisation.
Campaign responses and duplicates
There is evidence of a campaign to encourage supporters to take part in the consultation. 276 responses to Question 1 have been identified as potentially driven by the campaign, and details of the campaign have been included in the findings of Question 1 and discussed separately from the main responses. Responses to questions other than Question 1 did not seem to be driven by any specific campaign.
No single cluster of highly similar responses was larger than 3% of the total responses received for each question. While it is not possible to rule out multiple responses submitted by the same individual or organisation, responses which were similar or close duplicates were not removed from the analysis presented in this report.
Approach to quantitative analysis
Responses to closed-ended questions were analysed by reporting frequencies. Furthermore, segmentation analysis was conducted, where responses were grouped by respondent type to investigate how views varied between groups.
Descriptive analysis was conducted on the responses to the 6 closed-ended questions using the programming language Python. The main body of this report presents a breakdown of responses to each question by respondent type (individual or organisation).
Responses received were categorised into:
- structured according to the call for evidence questions: responses were submitted to the appropriate question by the respondent, in most cases through Citizen Space.
- not structured according to the call for evidence questions and long responses (e.g. received in PDF attachments): Alma Economics' researchers assigned responses to the appropriate call for evidence question to analyse them along with the structured responses.
Approach to qualitative analysis
A thematic analysis of responses was conducted, capturing the key themes expressed by the respondents to the call for evidence. Responses to the open-ended questions included in the analysis were read in full. In the main body of this report, we present the key themes identified in responses and a selection of supplementary quotes to illustrate respondents' views on each theme. Verbatim quotes were extracted in some cases to highlight the main themes that emerged. Quotes have been included for illustrative purposes, but these are not intended to be representative of all respondents. Respondents to the call for evidence completed a Respondent Information Form (RIF) which allowed them to specify their publishing preferences. Only extracts where the respondent indicated that they were content for their response to be published were quoted.
Structure of the final report
This report is organised into chapters that mirror the structure of the call for evidence document and presents a summary of the qualitative and quantitative analysis for open-ended and close-ended questions respectively. For closed-ended questions that are followed by an open-ended question (e.g. questions stating "please give reasons for your answer"), their analysis has been combined into one chapter to facilitate ease in reading. This report also includes a section summarising key findings, which collects themes that were repeated across several questions.
The qualitative analysis describes the most prominent themes mentioned in the responses to each question and is presented from the most frequently mentioned theme to the least. The number of themes across responses may differ due to the degree of consistency between responses – some questions have fewer themes than average when respondents are generally consistent with their answers and vice-versa.
The remainder of the report is structured as follows:
Contact
Email: Jane.McAteer@gov.scot
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