Public Confidence in Official Statistics, 2021

The Public Confidence in Official Statistics (PCOS) survey is intended to provide insights into the knowledge and opinions of the British public on official statistics, including their knowledge of, use of and trust in these statistics. 

In 2021, PCOS was run as a stand-alone push to web survey. Participants were encouraged to complete the 10 to15-minute survey online, but paper self-completion surveys were offered to all non-responding households to maximise response and sample quality. Fieldwork took place between 15th October and 20th December 2021. Up to two adults per sampled address could complete the survey. Interviews were achieved with a representative sample of 3,398 adults aged 18 and over in Britain from 2,379 households. This represents an adjusted household response rate of 24%. The majority of participants, 2,286, completed the survey online.

PCOS has been run intermittently over the last two decades including, most recently, in 2014, 2016 and 2018. From 2009 - 2018, PCOS was fielded as a module on NatCen’s face-to-face British Social Attitudes survey (BSA). The move to online fieldwork does create a risk that any differences identified between the results of the 2021 survey and those of previous waves of PCOS might, at least in part, be occasioned by the change of method rather than reflecting real change in public attitudes. However, PCOS 2021 has been designed to minimise, as far as possible, the impact of the change in mode on the comparability of the data over time.

The survey data include variables covering the following main topics:

• demographics
• awareness of organisations that use public statistics
• participation in and use of Office for National Statistics (ONS) surveys
• level of trust in public institutions
• level of trust in ONS statistics, and reasons for this
• usage and opinions of the Census, Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product, employment/unemployment statistics, crime statistics, and Covid-19 statistics

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