Summary information

Study title

Public Confidence in Official Statistics, 2021

Creator

National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)

Study number / PID

9051 (UKDA)

10.5255/UKDA-SN-9051-1 (DOI)

Data access

Restricted

Series

Not available

Abstract

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Public Confidence in Official Statistics (PCOS) survey is intended to provide insights into the knowledge and opinions of the British public on official statistics, including their knowledge of, use of and trust in these statistics.  In 2021, PCOS was run as a stand-alone push to web survey. Participants were encouraged to complete the 10 to15-minute survey online, but paper self-completion surveys were offered to all non-responding households to maximise response and sample quality. Fieldwork took place between 15th October and 20th December 2021. Up to two adults per sampled address could complete the survey. Interviews were achieved with a representative sample of 3,398 adults aged 18 and over in Britain from 2,379 households. This represents an adjusted household response rate of 24%. The majority of participants, 2,286, completed the survey online. PCOS has been run intermittently over the last two decades including, most recently, in 2014, 2016 and 2018. From 2009 - 2018, PCOS was fielded as a module on NatCen’s face-to-face British Social Attitudes survey (BSA). The move to online fieldwork does create a risk that any differences identified between the results of the 2021 survey and those of previous waves of PCOS might, at least in part, be occasioned by the change of method rather than reflecting real change in public attitudes. However, PCOS 2021 has been designed to minimise, as far as possible, the impact of the change in mode on the comparability of the data over timeMain Topics:The survey data include variables covering the following main topics:demographicsawareness of organisations that use public statisticsparticipation in and use of Office for National Statistics (ONS) surveyslevel of trust in public institutionslevel of trust in ONS statistics, and reasons for thisusage and opinions of the Census, Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product,...
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Methodology

Data collection period

15/10/2021 - 20/12/2021

Country

Great Britain

Time dimension

Cross-sectional (one-time) study

Analysis unit

Individuals
National

Universe

Adults aged 18 and over living in private households in Great Britain in 2021.

Sampling procedure

Multi-stage stratified random sample

Kind of data

Numeric

Data collection mode

Self-administered questionnaire: Web-based (CAWI)
Self-administered questionnaire: Paper

Funding information

Access

Publisher

UK Data Service

Publication year

2023

Terms of data access

The Data Collection is available to UK Data Service registered users subject to the End User Licence Agreement.

Commercial use of the data requires approval from the data owner or their nominee. The UK Data Service will contact you.

Related publications

Not available