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What is a ‘profile’ variable?

Profile variables are the demographic variables collected routinely about respondents by YouGov. Having these measures from YouGov’s existing data leaves more space for other important questions on the rest of the survey and avoids asking respondents for information they’ve already provided in the past.

 

These variables have the prefix ‘p_’. Profile variables are collected at intervals determined by YouGov and therefore should not be assumed to be measured at the time of a wave. Profile information with a wave identifier attached indicates that the profile data was the most up to date available at the time of that survey.

 

Profile variables include the demographic variables for:

  • Age
  • National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)
  • Parent’s NS-SEC
  • Highest educational qualification
  • Home ownership
  • Marital status
  • Age left education
  • Ethnicity
  • Local authority and education authority
  • Household income
  • Personal income
  • Household size
  • Number of children in household
  • Preferred daily newspaper
  • Religiosity
  • Religious denomination
  • Type of organisation worked for
  • Attending a private primary or secondary school
  • Big 5 personality measures

How can I submit items for consideration for the questionnaire?

The British Election Study Team is pleased to invite members of the BES user community to submit applications to include custom designed content to future waves of the BES Internet Panel Study.

 

Applications should be no longer than 2 pages (A4, font size 12) not including the questions or instruments which may be appended separately. Applications should set out the justification for inclusion in the BESIP, bearing in mind the criteria set out above. All proposals must include full details of the actual questions or experiments (including wording and response categories), rather than examples of possible instruments.

 

All proposals must be received at least 4 months in advance of the wave in which they are to first appear. This is to allow adequate time for the board to consider proposals, for the team to work with the proposer and with YouGov to finalise and test the instruments.

 

A decision will normally be made within two months of submission.

 

For further details on eligibility, criteria and how to submit your questionnaire proposals.

What geographic data is available on respondents?

YouGov routinely collects the postcodes of all its panel members. The British Election Study panel respondents are then coded into various geographies based on these postcodes. Currently, we include variables for three levels of political geography: p_pcon is the respondent’s 2010 Parliamentary Constituency, p_oslaua is the Local Authority and profile_GOR is their Government Office Region. Users can merge in any external data they have recorded at these geographies.

 

Data for lower levels of geography can be accessed via the UK Data Service. For the 2015 face-to-face survey, LSOA identifiers are available, while for the panel study, MSOA was made available in early 2021.

How was the text of the most important issue question coded?

Our respondents might think that any given issue is the most important facing the country. As such, we allow them to answer this question using an open text box. The problem, however, is that these data can be difficult to analyse. To aid our users, we categorise our respondents’ text-responses into a set of consistent closed categories.

 

The categorisation process involves computer-assisted trained human coders. Our coders receive one-on-one training and then use a reference guide to ensure that they code the open text responses consistently. For some waves, our coders also used machine learning tools to help speed up the process. In these cases, the software would learn which words tended to be associated with which categories and make suggestions to the coder to speed up the coding process. Discretion always lay with the human coder.

 

The original open text responses are available in the “Strings” files that accompany each panel release. The coded categories are available as “mii_cat” (where responses are coded into one of fifty closed categories) and “small_mii_cat” (where they are coded into one of twelve much broader categories). We strongly recommend that users verify that the open-ended responses match their interpretation of the category, especially when relying on categories with smaller numbers of responses.

Why didn’t you use the Moreno scale to ask about Scottishness and Britishness?

The Moreno scale for Britishness and Scottishness asked respondents whether they felt more British than Scottish.

 

Our national identity scales instead ask Scottish respondents to place themselves on a 7 point Britishness, Scottishness and Englishness scale. This allows a comparison of more than two identities and preliminary analysis of the Scottish Social Attitudes survey suggested that the two variables separately were better at predicting referendum intention than the Moreno scale.

 

We also felt that being able to look at the extent to which multiple identities are felt to be more compatible with Britishness than others.

How are the variables named?

We name variables in the dataset using descriptive names in camel case.

 

Naming variables descriptively helps to make analysis code more readable than naming variables by their question number. Question numbering is also less practical in a panel study, where a particular variable may change its position across waves.

What is the innovation module?

The innovation module contains items that are only asked to subsets of respondents. This includes questions submitted by BES users plus other experimental questions, and cover topics such as a respondent’s propensity to vote for a given party, whether they discuss politics regularly and if so who with, and how they would feel if a son or daughter married a supporter of a particular party (as a measure of social distance).

Note that these questions may also appear in the main survey in subsequent waves.

What demographic variables do you have about respondents?

  • Age
  • National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)
  • Parent’s NS-SEC
  • Highest educational qualification
  • Home ownership
  • Marital status
  • Age left education
  • Ethnicity
  • Local authority and education authority
  • Household income
  • Personal income
  • Household size
  • Number of children in household
  • Preferred daily newspaper
  • Religiosity
  • Religious denomination
  • Type of organisation worked for
  • Attending a private primary or secondary school
  • Big 5 personality measures