PSE UK 2012: Living standards questionnaire with top-level results

PSE UK team

This annotated questionnaire gives top level results for all the questions. The questionnaire covers a very wide range of questions on living standards, housing, services, finance, employment, education, crime and social networks. The top level results provide an overview of the state of the UK today and the struggles many have to make ends meet: for example, 6% of households have fallen behind with some or many of their bills and a further 12% have a constant struggle to keep up.

The answers on the questionnaire to questions asked of the main household respondent are highlighted in green and those asked of all indiviudals in the household are highlighted in yellow.
 
For questions where respondents can give multiple answers to the question, the percentages of both responses and of cases are given. The % response is the number of answers in each category divided by the number of responses - thus the % responses for all answer categories will sum to 100%. By contrast the % cases will sum to more than 100% as each respondent (case) can provide more than one answer.
 
So if you are interested in the percentage of households (if it is a household question) or individuals (if it is an individual question) who live in these circumstances/make this choice etc then you need to use the percentage of cases figure. Take, for example, this question on the top of page 14 on fuel poverty "Did your household cut back on fuel use at home in any of these ways last winter, because you could not afford the costs?". From the % of cases, we know that 29% of households report that they cut the number of hours the heating was on to reduce fuel costs. From the percentage of responses, we know that of the ways in which households cut back, or not, on fuel, 19% cut the number of hours that the heating is on.  
 
See the overview of the questionniare for more details of the questionnaires coverage.

Tweet this page