Air quality report 2022: public engagement

1.2 Methodology

1.2.1 Survey design

The survey included questions on: awareness of air pollution; understanding of the impacts of it; level of concern about it both generally and locally; perceptions of the role that individuals and organisations can play in tackling poor air quality; and perceptions of ultra-low emissions vehicles and public transport in Scotland (including push and pull factors for the uptake of these).

The majority of questions were designed to be single-response questions for the ease of the respondent but some multiple-response and open-ended questions were also included where appropriate.

Questions were ordered to minimise the impact of influencing responses i.e. broader and higher-level questions which required less prior knowledge were asked first, with more complicated questions, sometimes provided with definitions of key terms, asked later in the survey.

The survey was designed to be easy for all adults to understand (See Annex 1 for the full questionnaire).

The survey took approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Fieldwork was conducted between the 1^st and 13^th September 2022. A total of 1,520 respondents completed the survey.

1.2.2 Recruitment of participants

Adult participants (aged 16 years and above) were recruited using online panels^[1], with representative quotas set on age, gender and region. A ‘panel blend’ approach was taken to fieldwork. This involves blending the sample across several research panels to increase the potential overall sample size, help ensure good coverage across key demographic groups, and to reduce the risk of panel biases that can sometimes occur by relying solely on a single panel provider. The panels used for this project were:

• Panelbase
• Savanta
• Lucid

1.2.3 Weighting

The survey data used for this report is weighted to ensure the data is representative of the Scottish population aged 16+.

Results for respondents were weighted by age, gender, region, ethnicity and educational attainment.^[2]

1.2.4 Presentation of results

Throughout the report, results are discussed in terms of differences between sub-groups and the total result. Differences are considered to be significant at the 95% confidence level, meaning that there is only a 5% possibility that the difference occurred by chance rather than by being a real difference. This is a commonly accepted level of confidence.

The data used in this report are rounded up or down to the nearest whole percentage. It is for this reason that, on occasion, tables or charts may add up to 99% or 101%. Results that do differ in this way should not have a sum-total deviance that is larger than around 1 to 2%.

All differences highlighted in this report are statistically significant unless stated otherwise.