Ethnic Minority British Election Study Pilot, 2021

There have been various attempts to collect systematic survey data relating to Britain’s ethnic minority population’s political and social attitudes. These contain a mixture of surveys which are by now much outdated and do not reflect the vast political change of the last decade, surveys which have little space available for political and social attitudes in their questionnaires and some ad-hoc polling which is generally unrepresentative of ethnic minorities. The main reason for this omission is the cost of recruiting a sample.

This pilot study asked whether the surveying techniques adopted by the British Election Study in the pandemic – push-to-web methods- can be successfully deployed to deliver high quality value-for-money representative surveys of minority populations.

The push-to-web approach—as used by the British Election Study—is generally cheaper as it limits fieldwork costs as first contact with sampled addresses is done by mail and the interview itself is conducted online. Given the additional benefits of conducting the interview online, such as reducing social disability bias, ability to randomise and introduce survey experiments (Fieldhouse and Prosser, 2017), this approach would be a game changer for surveying ethnic minority public opinion if successful.

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