Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2025: Technical Report

7 Response rates

After taking into account the estimated number of eligible people aged 16 years or over per sampled address and the estimated proportion of addresses that were deadwood or ineligible, the individual and household level response rates have been calculated as follows:

1 Estimate based on SSA 2019 % ineligible

2 The number of households with at least one response as a proportion of all issued addresses

3 The number of households with at least one response as a proportion of all the eligible sample (i.e. adjusted for deadwood/ineligible)

2,300 households (18.3% of all issued addresses) fully or partially completed at least one questionnaire. Information on non-responding addresses is not fully captured in push-to-web surveys, so it is not possible to record accurately the number of selected addresses which were not eligible because, for example, they were non-residential addresses. If we assume the level of such addresses is the same as in the 2019 SSA survey (10%), the estimated adjusted household response rate in 2025 was 20.3%. Given an assumed average of 1.78^[5] eligible adults per address and a total of 3,043 productive interviews, there was an individual response rate of 15%. Of the total productive interviews, 3,014 were completed via the web survey and 29 via telephone interview. Response rates were higher than SSA 2024, which is likely related to the increased incentive for taking part from a £10 to a £15 voucher. Furthermore, the survey was left open erroneously for an additional two weeks to BSA and the previous SSA web survey which may have also contributed.

Table 3 below shows the achieved sample size for the full SSA sample (all respondents) for all previous years. Response rates (and thus issued sample) were considerably lower from 2021/22 onwards due to a change in survey mode from face-to-face to telephone in 2021/22 (due to the pandemic) and then web first from 2023-2025.

1 These figures include fully and partially completed interviews. A marker is set in each year of the survey for a respondent to have reached for an interview to be considered partially completed/productive which is typically around two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the survey or reaching the end of the topic modules (missing some or all of the final background information collected).

2 There were two versions of the survey in 2025; 1549 completed this version of the survey containing the modules funded by the Scottish Government and 1494 completed the other version of the survey funded by ESRC.

3 Response rates for the 2021/22 survey as the survey sampling approach was not comparable to the previous face-to-face nor the subsequent online surveys. Letter invitations to take part were issued to 21,775 addresses, of which 1349 households opted-in and 1043 provided at least one interview. Due to the effect of the pandemic on face-to-face fieldwork SSA was run via telephone prior to establishing the online first approach in line with BSA from 2023.