Introduction

Introduction

This report presents transport and travel findings from the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) 2021 telephone survey.

The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) is an annual survey carried out since 1999. It collects data on a wide range of topics not available from any other sources, and is at the heart of the Scottish Government's evidence-based approach to policy.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the SHS used face-to-face in-home interviewing. However, in March 2020, fieldwork was suspended in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only a small proportion of the 2020 survey had been completed. The approach was adapted, and the remainder of the 2020 survey fieldwork was carried out using telephone interviewing. In 2021, telephone interviewing was again used.

This publication summarises findings from telephone interviews. Reflecting the experimental nature of the change in approach, this publication is classed as Experimental Statistics rather than its usual classification of National Statistics.

The results of the SHS 2020 and 2021 telephone surveys are not directly comparable to SHS results for the years up to 2019.

Some of the differences between 2020 and 2021 figures may be due to seasonal effects.

Everything else being equal, we would expect some genuine changes in people's views, experiences, and habits relating to transport during the pandemic. However, it is not possible to determine the extent to which differences between the 2020 and 2021 results and previous years represent genuine changes in views and experiences, or are due to changes in how the survey was carried out.

Response rates for the telephone survey were lower than for previous face-to-face surveys, and there was a change in the profile of respondents (e.g. home owners and people with degree level qualifications were over-represented). There are also potential mode effects (respondents answering differently over the telephone than they would face-to-face).

The SHS 2020 methodology report provides more detail on the change in approach, and how this may have impacted the results.

2020 data only covered October 2020 and January to early April 2021, so there may have been a seasonal effect upon some data. In contrast, 2021 data covered all months from April 2021 to March 2022. Differences between the two years could be due, in part, to seasonal differences.

In July 2021, Transport Scotland released an initial publication summarising findings up to 2019 relating to disability and transport from the SHS.

An updated disability and transport report will be produced later this year to include 2021 data.

In 2021 we are publishing several new tables. These include:

• Table 52 Weekly cost of parking
• Table 53 Weekly cost of public transport
• Table 54 How easy or difficult people find it to afford transport costs
• Table 55 Do transport costs affect which method of travel is used
• Table 56 Number of days people travelled to work (timeseries)
• Table 56a Number of days people travelled to work (detail)
• Table 57 How often people use a car for certain activities
• Table 58 Table 58: How easily people can do certain activities without a car (those who always use a car)
• Table 59 Usual method of travel to further of higher education.

There are also more tables sub-divided by the Equality Act's protected characteristics, income, Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and urban-rural classification.

As well as household income, equivalised income before housing costs has also been calculated for some tables. This adjusts income according to the number of people who are in a household and whether they are adults or children. If a single person and a large family have the same net income, the single person will have a higher equivalised income. Households with the same equivalised income can be said to have the same standard of living.

In October 2021, Transport Scotland published a report highlighting the key trends in transport and travel in Scotland for the first year of the coronavirus pandemic (March 2020 to March 2021). It reports on changes in travel across all main modes of transport (walking, cycling, concessionary bus, rail, road, ferry and aviation).

In addition to this, throughout the coronavirus pandemic Transport Scotland published a range of transport analysis. This includes:

• Transport trends data summarising changes in key transport modes over the pandemic
• Public Attitudes Survey results, monitoring public attitudes to transport and travel during the COVID-19 outbreak
• Monthly Sub-National Reports, which presents transport trends at local authority level.

Our annual compendium statistics publication Scottish Transport Statistics, released annually in March, gathers together figures for a wide range of transport sources.

Excel tables have been published in the supporting files to this publication. These include figures for previous years and the relevant table numbers are referred to throughout this publication. The Excel tables include specific results for various sub-groups in the population (e.g. men and women, different age groups etc).

The Travel Diary is a section of the survey which involves respondents recounting details of all the journeys they made the previous day. A journey can consist of one or more stages. A new stage is defined when there is a change in the form of transport or when there is a change of vehicle requiring a separate ticket.

The more conventional survey content is referred to as the Social Survey.

Because of sampling variation, some differences may occur by chance. We therefore use standard statistical tests to examine whether differences are likely to be due to chance. Only differences that are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level are described as differences in the text of this report, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

A lookup table for confidence intervals is included (Table A), which can be used in conjunction with the estimates and sample size to give an indication of what inferences can reliably be made from the data. In some cases, where the sample size is below 50 respondents, years have been combined or estimates suppressed.

For a full list of transport statistics publications see: https://www.transport.gov.scot/our-approach/statistics/#

 

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