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TOWARDS BETTER ORAL HEALTH IN CHILDREN: ANALYSIS OF CONSULTATION RESPONSES
CHAPTER 3: APPROACH TO ANALYSIS
The consultation produced a vast quantity of largely qualitative material dispersed amongst 1342 responses. In addition to deploying an organised and robust framework for identifying and collating relevant comments from respondents, the exercise also required a number of ground-rules to be set to ensure responses were prepared for analysis in a consistent and sensible fashion. The main rules set were:
Duplicate responses
Based on previous experience of Government consultations, the research team was alert from the start to the need to identify duplicate responses. These occur when a respondent copies their response to addressees such as their MSP and Parliament in addition to the designated consultation address. In order to identify and remove duplicate responses from the exercise, the research team undertook an initial hand search of all responses followed by an electronic screen of respondents once the responses had been entered onto a database. These resulted in the order of 150 duplicate responses being identified and removed from the consultation.
Separate Responses from the Same Individual/Organisation
A similar issue arose when the same individual or organisation sent in more than one response on different days. Again, picked up by hand searching and electronic screening, these responses, if identical, were removed from the exercise, or, more frequently, collated into one comprehensive response from that particular individual or organisation, because each response contained fresh material.
Theming of Responses
An electronic ACCESS database was used to store and assist analysis of the responses. The fields used to record the material were based on the themes for discussion presented in the consultation document and a detailed examination of the first 200 responses to be submitted. Themes emerging from the responses were added to those already stipulated by the consultation to provide a comprehensive list which formed the headings for the ACCESS fields.
Subjectivity
Any exercise of this size and nature will involve some degree of judgement and subjectivity in organising material and subsequent analysis. In this instance, some degree of judgement was required at the point of categorising material under themes and in allocating responses under the "depth of response" headings (see p. 15). In order to minimise inconsistencies in approach, members of the research team double-checked each other's decisions and highlighted to each other where a second opinion was required.
Quantitative Material
Although mainly qualitative in focus, a limited number of possibilities for quantitative analysis presented themselves and were exploited. Generally, these involved counts of the numbers and percentages of respondents who responded on particular topics and, within these subgroups, the numbers and percentages of respondents holding particular views. However, because of the open nature of the consultation, which did not require people to provide a response on
every issue, and the fact that respondents "opt in" to their chosen response topics, any statistics quoted here cannot be extrapolated to a wider population outwith the consultation population.
Naming Respondents
The convention adopted for this consultation has been to name, where relevant, respondent organisations, but to retain the anonymity of individual members of the public. Many of the comments included in the report were put forward by several respondents. For practical reasons, it has not been possible to list all commentators on every issue. Instead, examples of respondents holding those views have been listed, in an attempt to provide a flavour of the types of respondent involved. This approach enables all key points to be documented with minimal interruption to the flow of text.
The following 10 Chapters document the substance of the analysis, presenting the main issues, arguments and solutions contained in the responses. These follow broadly the ordering of issues raised in the consultation document. Chapter 14 takes an overview of these and highlights action points and recommendations.
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