Scottish Government Response to British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme: Consultation on Regulatory Changes and Scheme Delivery

Methodology

Initial statistical and thematic analyses were carried out by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) on behalf of the Scottish Government. A basic descriptive statistical analysis was conducted to produce percentages denoting agreement with the premises of the two questions.

Thematic analysis was conducted on free-text responses to the two consultation questions in order to identify the key arguments, concerns, and perspectives expressed by respondents. The approach followed the principles of inductive thematic analysis, whereby themes were derived from the content of the responses themselves rather than imposed in advance.

For each question, responses were read in full and an initial set of themes was developed to reflect the range of substantive arguments present in the data. A codebook was then produced setting out each theme, its definition, and the criteria for applying it to a response. Responses were coded against this codebook, with each response able to attract more than one theme code where it addressed multiple distinct arguments. The prevalence of each theme was then calculated as a percentage of the total number of free text responses to that question.

To ensure the reliability and consistency of the coding, a quality assurance process was conducted in which a second researcher independently coded a sample of responses using the same codebook, without reference to the codes applied by the first researcher. Inter-rater reliability was then calculated using a score between 0 and 1, where 1 represents perfect agreement. A threshold of 0.6 was set as the minimum acceptable level of agreement. Where the score fell below this threshold, the coding process for that question was reviewed and repeated, with any discrepancies between coders discussed and resolved before final codes were applied.

As a final quality assurance measure, a Scottish Government lead researcher rechecked all coding, calculations, theme allocations, and percentages outputs following completion of the DBT analyses. This review confirmed consistency of the coding, that results were accurately reflected, and that statistical and thematic findings were correctly reported.