Immigration and Race on the Ipsos Issues Index

One of the major benefits of our Issues Index data series is that it is an unbroken trend back to 1974, allowing us to track the most important issues over the long-term. We ask it without prompting respondents with a pre-determined list, which makes it a key salience measure – what’s top of people’s minds.

The interviewers have a long list of possible responses (and an “other” category for anything that doesn’t fit), but respondents do not see any of this – the interviewer codes everything that the respondent says into as many categories as are relevant.

This is then a pretty “pure” view of opinion, but it does create some issues over time – and the “Immigration/race relations” category is a good example of that. This has been a single category on the interviewers’ list since 1974. Over that time the social and political context has shifted significantly, so that issues of race and immigration have perhaps grown apart: there is at least more prominent discussion now on how race and immigration are very separate issues.

A key question for us then is whether to break the trend and separate the issues. To answer this, we have conducted an experiment where half the sample (c1,000 interviews) used the usual categories, and the other half had split categories, one for immigration and one for race relations. This allows us to keep the trend line going on one half of the sample, while seeing how opinion breaks down when we code the responses separately.

The results from this split-category half of the sample are shown in the chart below. As suspected, the large majority of the population who would be coded into a single combined immigration/race category are mentioning immigration alone. Overall, 39% of the sample mention immigration, and 2% mention immigration plus race relations, meaning 37% mention only immigration.

But there are also 5% of the sample who mention race relations alone, with no reference to immigration. Therefore the direct comparison with the standard way of coding the question (immigration or race relations) would be 39% plus 5%, which gives a combined figure of 44%.

The finding from the other half of the sample, where both issues were in one single category, was 38% mentioning immigration/race relations – somewhat lower.  

This is interesting, and maybe slightly counterintuitive. It suggests that our concerns about interviewers struggling to find the correct category when they are split and therefore under-recording are unfounded. Instead it seems that having one single category may result in interviewers under-recording concern about race relations – perhaps because they do not spot it in a combined category, and therefore race issues that are not related to immigration are missed.

When it is listed as a separate category, race relations are mentioned by 7% as one of the top issues in the country. That puts it well outside the top 10, but still a significant concern – on a par with issues such as Europe and drug abuse.

Overall then, to more correctly reflect concerns, we will change the response categories to record immigration separately from race relations, starting from our October 2014 survey.

This clearly creates some issues with trending from past waves. However, given that the “immigration” figure from the split category question (39%) closely mirrors the figure for “immigration/race relations” from the combined category question (38%), we do not think this presents a major discontinuity. We will mark it as a change in the trend, and continue to regularly test the stability of these findings through further split sample experiments.