Deep polling during Covid period: FOI release

Information requested

At some point during of the pandemic in 2020, the Scottish Government or one of its agencies started regular "deep polling" to ascertain the population's attitude to anti-Covid measures already in place at the time or planned.

Please provide the following related information:

a) period during which such polling took place

b) regularity and/or number of such polls during period with anti-Covid measures

c) method of polling (random or panel; phone or face to face, etc) and number of people polled on average (and minimum and maximum)

d) five typical questionnaries from different times (beginning, middle, end of period with anti-Covid measures)

e) polling results for the five polls in (d)

Response

During the pandemic the Scottish Government put in place a public polling survey to establish a clear understanding of how the public were feeling, their attitudes towards the pandemic and the required restrictions/guidance, their reported behaviour in relation to the required restrictions/guidance, knowledge of what was required as well as questions related to key areas such as vaccination, testing, Long Covid, Distance Aware and certification.

a & b) The first poll was carried out w/c 23 March 2020 and polling was then conducted weekly through to June 2021 (apart from w/c 21 December 2020). From June 2021 polling was conducted fortnightly, moving to monthly from April 2022.

c) The polling surveys have been conducted using an online interview administered to members of the YouGov Plc UK panel. Total sample size is c.1000 adults 18yrs+ each wave.

d & e) All questions and answers relating to this ongoing survey are published on our website: Public attitudes to coronavirus: tracker - data tables - gov.scot (www.gov.scot). The Excel spreadsheets in this location show the questions asked each wave with the answer options and results for each answer option – from week 1 onwards.

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