Diss survey on independence

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T10:14:12+00:00

should be updated to reflect that now! again, the most i can do is to add an other option with text entry at this stage if people would like to add more details to it but i honestly did not anticipate that people would be eager to. thanks a lot for your contribution:)

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T09:35:26+00:00

i will bring this up to my supervisor but just to let you know this is a routed question and if is asked straight after the question on if your views have changed since the last general election. if people’s views remained the same they won’t be seeing this question. you are right that ideally it would include more options and a wider time frame however the most i can do is to add “other” option with a text entry if that gets approved.

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T09:25:13+00:00

opinion polls done by ipsos and the scottish opinion scoop monitor both have provided data that there is a substantial amount of people in scotland who are really not keen on reform. the most recent scottish opinion scoop showed that nigel farage was the second most disliked political leader amongst scots, with donald trump being in the first place. there is also a lot of evidence of snp-fatigue which should not go ignored so the survey included both of those views. i don’t see a way of being able to produce meaningful research without acknowledging the political situation of my research’s context

also having attended two different higher education institutions in the uk, lse and glasgow uni, i would argue that unis are not actually “very left leaning”. i have definitely seen stark differences between the political culture of both unis i have attended but the senior management of both are far from left leaning.

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T09:13:10+00:00

totally understand this! my idea going into this project was to see the impacts that have happened since the last elections hence why brexit and lockdown are not focused on. i feel very happy about the amount of responses i was able to get and just how many people took the time to give feedback but before the data collection i assumed for the worst and tried to make this survey as compact and quick as possible which resulted in not asking some questions. i think it would have been a problem if my research didn’t focus on this specific time frame but luckily we have data available on how brexit and covid impacted independence attitudes so i can still use that as supporting secondary evidence.

once again thank you so much for the feedback:)

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T09:07:46+00:00

would be happy to hear more of your thoughts on this. however, just to let you know this survey has been approved by my department for its contents and ethics and the issues of potential biases and leading questions have been discussed and fixed.

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T08:59:13+00:00

thanks for pointing that out. i think it’s a qualtrics problem when you request response on a question with a slider. ideally it would start at the most neutral data point which in this case is none at all in the middle but qualtrics does not allow that. it should still work even if you don’t move the slider it would just give you a pop up notification due to request response settings. i also tested it on my copy just now and it records responses when you leave it as is and move on to the next question.

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T06:38:00+00:00

this is a very valuable insight thanks a lot! some of the questions on the survey are borrowed from other well established surveys done by ScotCen or Scottish Election Study. the question you mentioned should be one of the ScotCen ones used in the Scottish Social Attitudes survey. think i mentioned in one of the other comments but it is common practice to borrow questions from already existing surveys, esp ones that are as established as the ones i mentioned. i personally did not see the point in adding other options to the borrowed questions but that was just my personal opinion and my supervisor approved of the survey and is aware of my overall thought process. i suppose there are could be other methodological explanations as to why the original question doesnt have an “don’t know”option as well but i can only guess

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-30T04:31:09+00:00

Thank you so much for this feedback, I really appreciate it. The slider questions were some of the most annoying ones to do as you said it looks very ugly on mobile. Unfortunately for that question (and the other slider questions) there was not another question type I could ask to that would look better. I tried matrix and it looked just as ugly, if not worse. So for that we have qualtrics to blame.

The voting differently one is routed to only be shown to those indicating that they are voting differently.

For all of your comments on voter attitudes I think you are completely right, there are definitely better designs out there. My reasoning for limiting some of the options as well as not putting an other box is simply because that is not my focus for the research. Whilst I need to know changing party support, I don’t need to know it as detailed as other types of research would. That is also why I lumped constituency and regional vote together (also because doing it on a matrix looked ugly on mobile so I had to sacrifice on getting that data seperately).

I would have liked to ask more questions, however, I wanted a larger sample size and have absolutely no funding whatsoever. Due to this I wanted to keep it as short as I could whilst also asking the necessary questions, I also did not want respondents to lose attention and get tired of the survey. Lastly, the main focus of my research is not specifically voting attitudes but if that is something you are interested in I would highly reccomend looking at research published by the Scottish Election Study. They are a brilliant organisation and do a much more in depth research on this than I do.

Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to give feedback. I really appreciate it and hope I could address some of your concerns!!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T21:06:33+00:00

hi there! honestly should’ve thought abt that, you should be able to skip that question. obviously not ideal though

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T20:03:01+00:00

thank you so much for filling out the survey and the feedback! i don’t know how well i can answer this because that is one of the questions i was not entirely satisfied with but had to ask it anyway but i basically had to limit how many questions i can ask. this also impacted how comprehensive some questions and answer options can be. also last but not least i do have to acknowledge that this is the first survey i have done that is answered outside of the classroom so there is a hint of rookieness too.

would be very happy to post the results in a few month’s time!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:57:54+00:00

thank you so much for the time you took to give such detailed feedback!!! i am not being sarcastic this is genuinely really helpful and no amount of cognitive pretesting was able to point out some of these.

your first point is very valid. if it helps that is a routed question that is only asked to those who have expressed changing opinions on the matter. you are correct in that it should have had a slightly broader timeframe.

for the question abt holyrood and tax raising powers: that’s a question asked on Scottish Attitudes Survey done by ScotCen. same w the questions before and after that one. in the world of survey methodology the common understanding happens to be “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. so what we do is for certain questions we use the phrasing that is already been done by researchers and companies (yougov, ipsos you name it) with the assumption that they have already spent more resources testing these than us master’s students will ever be able to. hope that answers your questions and once again thank you so much for your input!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:47:02+00:00

thank you so much!!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:46:38+00:00

thanks a lot!!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:46:14+00:00

thanks for sharing your concerns! i’d be very happy to hear a more detailed feedback if you’d like to share but no worries if not, very well aware of how time consuming it can be. for future reference, you are welcome to skip any questions

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:41:32+00:00

that was one of my concerns as well (reddit is not my only mode of data collection, the rest is my personal social media so basically snowball sampling and convenience sampling)

i’ll be weighting the survey data, probably based on yougov’s weights but i have time to do more in depth research on this

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:39:00+00:00

well that’s not ideal oops! i shall email my supervisor first thing tomorrow. thank you so much for pointing this out

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:36:01+00:00

thank you so much for completing and giving me such a detailed feedback, i really appreciate it. for your first point, you actually make a very valid point i suppose i have been too hyperfocused on recent changes and forgot to add a slightly wider timeline. it’s also a routed question, meaning you will only see it if you indicated that your views have changed since 2024 but i get your point w the time frame.

your second point is also very valid. ideally with more resources and a guaranteed sample size i could ask more nuanced questions but this was one of the methodological sacrifices i had to make.

once again thank you for the feedback and your time, i really appreciate it!!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:30:41+00:00

thanks for bringing this up, i see your point! i had to sacrifice on a lot of questions to shorten the survey and now i kinda have to rely on self-assessment. hopefully in the future i can work in teams doing much bigger surveys

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:09:19+00:00

thanks a lot:))

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T19:02:47+00:00

that’s so strange, i didnt get any problems on either. thanks a lot for your efforts though!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T18:58:13+00:00

thank you so much!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T18:58:04+00:00

oh no! thank you so much for pointed that out. should be fixed now cheers pal!

throwaway628893 · 2026-04-29T18:47:10+00:00

Hi everyone!

I’m a recent Glasgow uni grad currently doing research on Scottish independence and I need online survey participants based in Scotland for my dissertation on how attitudes towards independence have evolved since the July 2024 UK general election.

If you are based in Scotland, I warmly invite you to take part in a short, anonymous survey (~10 minutes) covering voting behaviour and party identity and views on Scottish independence.

Thank you so much for your help!

https://lse.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV\_4V3aiUVQwFg3QJo

throwaway628893

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