Background
In March 2006, updated procedures for procuring Social Research were published by the Scottish Government. One year on, members of the Research Policy and Practice Working Group wanted to evaluate the impact of these new procedures on both procurers and contractors of Social Research. The views of procurers of Social Research were sought through an online survey which took place from March to April 2007, and through a number of focus groups conducted in July 2007.
The present report summarises the findings of a subsequent online survey targeted at contractors of Social Research. As well as providing a sense of how the different stages of the procurement process are perceived by research contractors, the present report also makes suggestions for improvement. With the close co-operation of the Research Policy and Practice Working Group, the survey was designed, analysed and reported by Alexa Ispas.
Research aims
The aim of the survey was to gather the views of Social Research contractors on:
- the different stages of the new Scottish Government procurement procedures
- how to improve each of these stages for Social Research contractors
Survey Design
To fulfil the above aims, the survey broadly addressed each of the different stages of the procurement process, with each section comprising both structured and open ended questions. The survey was made available on the Questback on-line software package, and was analysed using the system and SPSS.
Sample
The survey was sent to all research contractors listed on the Scottish Government Social Research database (CERES), with 75 responses received. As CERES does not provide information on the total number of contractors, the response rate could not be calculated. It should also be noted that not all respondents answered every question they were asked, and not all respondents were asked every question (as some questions were only appropriate for a sub-sample), so the total number of responses to each question varies.
Breakdown of sample
The questions at the beginning of the survey focused on (i) the amount of experience individual respondents had of undertaking Scottish Government Social Research; and (ii) details of the organisation respondents were working for.
It should be noted that a larger sample would have allowed these questions to be used in order to identify particular groups that were satisfied/dissatisfied with specific aspects of the procedures. However, given the size of the final sample, (and particularly of the different sub-samples) such an analysis would not have yielded conclusive results.
Nevertheless, the breakdown of the sample is reassuring as it shows a good spread in terms of contact with different analytical units, length of time respondents have been personally undertaking research for the Scottish Government, and type of research being undertaken. A detailed overview of the sample is available in the Appendix.
Previous | Contents | Next