Running in parallel to the recent consultation on making at least some Space for People permanent, the Council conducted market research to understand what a cross-section of Edinburgh’s population feel. This is because consultations can often disproportionately attract responses from people with strong views.

As the survey will feature in the forthcoming SfP debate, I thought it was important to ask (1) which questions were asked and (2) how the people who responded were identified.

Which question were asked?
It appears the survey followed the same basic format of the of the online consultation, so that the responses could be compared. The Council say the survey “uses essentially identical questions as were on the Consultation Hub. The only appreciable difference between this survey and that on the Consultation Hub is that the Market Research  asked questions about potential retention or removal of streets using a geographical split of the city.  This was not done on the Consultation Hub for software reasons and to keep the survey as short as reasonably practical.”

Linked below is the survey text.

Who were asked to complete the survey?
I asked how the people who completed the survey were identified, and if they matched the demographics of the city population as much as possible. Age, income, gender etc, and were spread across this city?

I was given this reassurance – “In short, yes. We asked the MR company to look at the demographics of the sample against  the most recent Edinburgh People’s survey to check that it was as representative as possible…. There were respondents from all parts of the city.” … “we asked the MR company to look at the demographics of the sample against  the most recent Edinburgh People’s Survey. We also asked them to weight for sex/age if necessary to help achieve results that were as representative of the Edinburgh population as possible.” …

“We did not collect information on income, so it was not possible to weight for that, We did ask a question on household car ownership in the questionnaire; as well as giving  valuable insights in itself this tends to be a fairly good proxy for household income. We haven’t yet compared this information against latest info for Edinburgh, but I am pretty confident that it indicates somewhat higher household car ownership in the sample than in the Edinburgh population as a whole. We have not weighted for car ownership.“

The results have been weighted as below.

Age Group	Age distribution of sample (unweighted)	Edinburgh People’s Survey  results –  used for weighting
18-24	8%	15%
25-44	37%	40%
45- 64	38%	28%
65+	17%	17%

Gender	Age distribution of sample (unweighted)	Edinburgh People’s Survey 2019 results –  used for weighting
Female	51%	52%
Male	49%	48%

More details of the methodology are in the file below.