Footnotes
1. Including the finding that many people thought the Scottish Executive was just another name for the Scottish Parliament, reported in previous years Scottish Social Attitudes survey reports.
2. The UK Statistics Authority assumed power on 1 April 2008. See their website - http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ - for further information.
3. The precise figure given for response rates depends on whether dwelling units whose eligibility to participate was unknown are included or excluded from the calculation. Dwelling units are coded as 'unknown eligibility' where the interviewer is unable to establish whether the property is occupied and residential. The higher response rate excludes dwelling units of unknown eligibility from the calculation, while the lower rate includes them. As some of the dwelling units whose eligibility was unknown are likely to be eligible and some ineligible, the true response rate probably lies somewhere between the two figures.
4. It is possible to make a case for the opposite - that disinclination to trust government may result in people being more inclined to take direct action outside the ballot box on the basis that 'politics is far too important to be left solely to the politicians' (Marsh, 1977). However, Curtice and Seyd's (2003) analysis of the relationship between trust, efficacy and non-electoral participation suggests that this is not the case and that, in so far as lack of trust has an impact, it does seem to be in terms of feeling that getting involved is 'unlikely to be worth the effort'.
5. Prior to 2004, this question asked about the Scottish Parliament. However, in response to criticisms that the two questions were not comparing alike institutions, a split sample experiment was undertaken in which half the sample were asked about the Scottish Parliament and half about the Scottish Executive. The difference in wording made a negligible difference to the results (see Bromley and Given, 2005, for full results), so from 2005 onwards the question was changed to ask about the Scottish Executive.
6. The question about trust to act in Scotland's best interests used a four-point 'temporal' scale ranging from 'just about always' to 'almost never', while the 'fair decisions' question used a five-point scale based on 'amount' of trust, with options ranging from 'a great deal' to 'not at all'.
7. The question wording in each year was:
1999 "Will a Scottish Parliament…"
2000 "Do you think that having a Scottish parliament is going to…"
2001-2007 "Do you think that having a Scottish Parliament is giving…"
8. The Economist (May 18 2006) 'Home truths about home rule' http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6941798
9. The question wording in each year was:
1999 "Will a Scottish Parliament…"
2000 "Do you think that having a Scottish parliament is going to…"
2001-2007 "Do you think that having a Scottish Parliament is giving…"
10. Only the change in the proportion attributing the standard of public transport to the UK government is statistically significant.
11. The data presented here is informed by regression analysis, used to identify which factors were significantly associated with positive perceptions of government in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Factors identified by one or both of these models were then tested to establish whether there was an interaction between that factor, year and the variable of interest (e.g. trust). This analysis is explained in more detail in Annex B.
12. Although bivariate analysis (where one variable is cross-tabulated by another, for example trust by age) appears to suggest that the increase in positive perceptions was particularly marked among older people (65+) in fact further analysis shows that this is not statistically significant - positive views have simply increased across the whole age spectrum.
13. For further details, see /OverviewSIMDhttp://www.scottishexecutive.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/ . The areas SSA respondents lived in were matched to SIMD quintiles, with 1 being the most deprived and 5 being the least deprived.
14. NB although there are some variations in the changes in attitudes to government from 2006 to 2007 between people in urban and rural areas, there is no clear pattern and the interaction between year, urban-rural and attitudes to government is at best only marginally significant.
15. When SNP identifiers were just very slightly more likely than Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters to think having a Scottish Parliament gives Scotland a stronger voice - 56% compared with 55% of Labour supporters and 51% of Liberal Democrats.
16. However, unlike that study we did not find a significant association between marital status, education or age and trust in statistics.
17. NB in 1999 the question was phrased prospectively - i.e. "Will a Scottish parliament increase the standard of education in Scotland, reduce the standard of education in Scotland or will it make no difference?"
18. In 2000 the question was "Do you think that having a Scottish parliament is going to ...READ OUT....increase the standard of education in Scotland, reduce the standard of education in Scotland, or, will it make no difference?"
19. Note that scores were banded in SPSS, hence they may differ slightly from the sum of the percentage scores in the top half of the table as these are rounded to zero decimal places.
20. Means are calculated on sample excluding don't know/not answered.
21. The Scottish Centre for Social Research was formed in February 2004 as the result of a merger between The National Centre's existing organisation within Scotland and Scottish Health Feedback, an independent research consultancy.
22. Like many national surveys of households or individuals, in order to attain the optimum balance between sample efficiency and fieldwork efficiency the sample was clustered. The first stage of sampling involved randomly selecting postcode sectors. The sample frame of postcode sectors was also stratified (by region and the percentage of people in non-manual occupations) to improve the match between the sample profile and that of the Scottish population, while a further layer of stratification based on the Scottish Executive urban-rural classification enabled us to boost the number of addresses in remote and rural areas. For further details of the sample design, see para 6 below.
23. Lynn, Peter, et al (2001) Recommended standard final outcome categories and standard definitions of response rates for social surveys, Institute for Social and Economic Researc
24. The stratification was based on 7 categories, with categories 4 and 5 of the Scottish Executive 8-fold classification collapsed together (i.e. Large urban areas (1), Other Urban Area (2), Accessible Small Town (3), Remote or Very Remote Small Town (4 and 5), Accessible Rural Area (6), Remote Rural Area (7), Very Remote Rural Area (8)). Categories 4 and 5 were collapsed in part because there was little difference between these areas in terms of known non-response - see point III above.
25. See http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/SIMD/Overview for further details on the SIMD
26. These variables were created by the ScotCen/NatCen Survey Methods Unit. They are based on SIMD scores for all datazones, not just those included in the sample - so an individual who lives in the most deprived quintile of Scotland will also be included in the most deprived quintile in the SSA dataset.