Where's the data on that "Future of England" survey? #indyref

2 min read

The survey was conducted by YouGov and the University of Cardiff on behalf of the ESRC "Future of the UK and Scotland" research programme led by the University of Edinburgh.

The research centre press release is here. (pdf)
The full survey data from YouGov is here. (pdf)

(a note on YouGov - they are actually really good at publishing survey results in their archive, but searching the archive is harder. Basically you need to know the approximate date that the results were published, and look around there. If a survey has just hit the headlines, it's liable to have just been published so it will be at the front, but looking for older survey results can be a pain. And of course, when you do get them they are pdf, so you have to copy them into a spreadsheet manually in order to play with them :-( It's usually abot 2 weeks after the field work that YouTube publish, but for some reason this one was held up till now despite the field work being in April [hmmmm....])

There's no real gold hidden in the data this time, unless you need further evidence that English Conservative and UKIP voters are narrow-minded, vindictive sods. But as a general principle of connected journalism, if you write about a survey you should link to the full data from that survey.

Image: Jabernal at Open Clip Art (no license shown, assumed CC-BY)