Cleveland Police Authority Survey — Briefing Note

As an organisation which relies upon public trust in the objectivity and professionalism of our work, Ipsos would take any suggestions of inappropriate practice very seriously indeed.

1. Interviewers identifying themselves
   All Ipsos interviewers are trained and monitored to ensure that they follow the agreed wording of the questionnaire, including the introduction. On this occasion this meant that interviewers introduced every interview with "Good morning / afternoon / evening. My name is … from Ipsos, the research organisation, and we are carrying out a survey for Cleveland Police". We have deliberately designed the introduction to be unambiguous.
2. The phrasing of questions
   We have taken great care to ensure the wording of the questions is objective and unbiased. Indeed, we are very happy to share details of the questions asked and the respective findings. The results from the survey (which show the question wording) are available on our website and can be sent upon request (we have attached them with this email). We have deliberately included a question on levels of awareness around the suggestions for restructuring in order to provide a fair account of findings, including the context in which respondents are thinking about the issues. This is something that has already informed discussion around the findings. We are confident that there is nothing to give respondents the impression that they are being asked to comment on "Northumbria and Durham taking over Cleveland" as has been suggested.
3. Asking about household details
   It is standard practice in survey research to ask respondents to give some brief details about themselves to ensure that the survey is genuinely representative of the types of people who live in the area. As the results show, we collected information on people's age and gender to make sure that the profile of respondents matched that of the population of the local area. We did not ask any question relating to presence of children in the household.
4. Ipsos quality controls
   All Ipsos interviewers are trained to meet the standards of IQCS — the Interviewer Quality Control Scheme. Interviewers are continuously being monitored and accompanied by supervisors, and a rigorous system of back-checking — in excess of IQCS regulations — is applied to ensure that the interviewers have conducted the interviews professionally and in line with survey specifications. In practice we exceed the IQCS requirements by monitoring a minimum of 10% of interviews. All interviews are monitored in real time by fully qualified and experienced supervisors. The IQCS requirement for monitoring interviews is just 5%. Interviewers are monitored remotely both by audio and visually and are never aware when they are being monitored.

Technical note about the survey
Findings are based on 4,798 telephone interviews with residents aged 16+ in the North East. Between 201 and 220 interviews were conducted in each local authority area. Fieldwork took place between the 7th and 23rd April 2006. Results are weighted by local authority area, age and gender (within authority area) to the known population profile of residents aged 16+.

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