Scottish Government

Chapter One Background and Method

1.1 Since 1998 a Government-led communications campaign has been run to address the issue of domestic abuse in Scotland. Through an on-going programme of advertising and other publicity measures, the objective of this campaign is to reinforce public opposition to, and condemnation of, domestic abuse as totally unacceptable behaviour.

1.2 In December 2005, the Scottish Executive Office of Chief Researcher ( OCR) commissioned TNS System Three to conduct research to monitor awareness and effectiveness of the campaign. TNS System Three has been tracking the domestic abuse campaign since its launch in 1998.

1.3 As with the previous waves of research, the TNS System Three CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing) omnibus, Scottish Opinion Survey ( SOS), was used to collect quantitative data. For sensitive questions relating to attitudes and experience of domestic abuse, respondents entered their views on a self-completion basis directly on to the hand-held computer. This approach is seen to be more anonymous and confidential and hence can lead to a more honest response. The questions relating to advertising were then asked by the interviewers.

1.4 This document contains the latest findings from the research (Wave 9), conducted following the 2005 campaign activity (Phase 8).

1.5 Phase 8 of the campaign started on 26 ^th December 2005 and ran until the week commencing 23 ^rd January 2006. The campaign consisted of TV and radio, augmented by a small amount of editorial coverage in the press. The TV advert ' Reminder' and the radio advert ' Elizabeth' were newly developed by the Newhaven advertising agency in 2005 to shift the focus of public awareness to psychological aspects of domestic abuse, and the effect of domestic abuse on children.

1.6 The tracking questionnaire used for the survey was updated in response to the new TV and radio executions created for the campaign. One important change was the definition of domestic abuse given in the introduction to the survey: the latest wave used a broader definition - "By domestic abuse we mean occasions where one partner in a relationship assaults the other, either physically, psychologically, verbally or sexually."

1.7 In addition, the tracking questionnaire was augmented at the latest wave to address new secondary research aims, namely investigating the perceptions of the public in relation to wider forms of violence against, and exploitation of, women. Due to the sensitive nature of these questions respondents aged 16-17 were excluded. The tracking questionnaire which includes these additional questions is appended.

1.8 At the latest wave the TV advert was shown on Scottish, Grampian and Border TV stations, alongside Channel 4 and Channel 5, as previous domestic abuse campaigns have been. An exception to this was Phase 7 of the campaign in 2004, which ran on Channel 4 and Channel 5 only. This should be taken into account when assessing the performance of the current campaign (Wave 9 of the research) relative to the previous wave.

1.9 For this latest wave, a sample of 1032 adults aged 16 and over was interviewed in-home in 42 sampling points throughout Scotland over the period 26 ^th January - 1 ^st February 2006. To ensure that the sample was representative of Scotland's adult population in terms of age, sex and socio-economic group ( SEG) ⁵, it was weighted to match population estimates from the National Readership Survey ( NRS) of January - December 2004. The sample profile, both unweighted and weighted, is shown in Table 1.1.

1.10 Weighting is often used in surveys to adjust data so that the people interviewed are a truly representative sample of the population, or to correct any slight under/over representations that can occur during sampling. In this case, to allow the results of each stage to be directly comparable and to remove any possibility that the variation in profile was influencing any changes in findings, the sample was weighted by demographics to match NRS estimations of Scotland's population profile (see above).

Table 1.1 - Sample profile
Base: 1032 (%)

Notes on report

1.11 This report presents the findings for the sample as a whole. Sub-groups of the sample, such as different age groups, social classes, geographical regions ⁶ and sex are separated out in the data tabulations.

1.12 The main findings are summarised in the next chapter. Where applicable, results are compared to previous waves of research.

1.13 Throughout the report, the figures referred to are weighted figures. Where significant results are referred to within the report, these are significant at the 95% confidence level or above. All other differences noted are not statistically significant.

1.14 Where "*" appears in the report and data tables, this represents a percentage greater than zero but less than 0.5%. Within the tables in the report, the term 'N' refers to the unweighted base sample size.