The Scottish Opinion Monitor (Scoop) is the Scottish Election Study’s regular opinion poll of a representative sample of Scottish voting-age adults, running since December 2021.
You can find links to Scoop tables, datasets and an FAQ below.
Tracker
Time-series visualisations of selected core Scoop measures can be found here.
Data tables
November 2022
February 2023
June 2023
October 2023
February 2024
Full datasets
Full Scoop datasets are available at the Scottish Election Study GitHub within three months of collection.
FAQ
How is the Scoop collected?
Administered in partnership with YouGov and run at four-monthly intervals, each Scoop survey is sent to a different cross-sectional sample of approximately 1,200 respondents. Like most opinion polls, it is an online, self-completion survey.
What’s the Scoop for?
The Scottish Election Study project, running in various iterations since the beginning of devolution, has historically only run surveys immediately before and after major national elections. The Scoop, funded by the ESRC as part of the current SES grant, is designed to provide more fine-grained data between elections. We aim to inform Scottish public debate by providing regular, reliable measures of Scottish public opinion for academic researchers, policymakers, news media and the general public.
What’s in the Scoop?
The Scoop contains a lengthy core set of questions we ask in every edition. The remainder of space in the survey is taken up by various other items. Sometimes we ask questions of relevance to contemporary events, especially if we think public opinion on these matters might help us better understand vote choice or attitudes to constitutional issues. We also occasionally use the Scoop to run survey experiments of interest to us from a scientific standpoint and can provide space for other researchers who might not have regular access to representative voter samples.
When is Scoop data released?
We aim to release Scoop datasets within 90 days of collection. We include all core measures and most other items in these datasets, although sometimes we will withhold data on experiments or questions which we or other scholars intend to use for scientific publications. Since the November 2022 edition we have released documents containing crosstabulations on core measures and selected other items within a few days of receiving the data.
What are the “core” measures in the Scoop?
The core tracking measures include:
– Questions about whether Scotland is going in the “right direction”
– Most important issues
– Party ID and strength
– National identity scales (Scottish and British)
– Scottish Parliament vote intention (constituency and list)
– Westminster general election vote intention
– Scottish independence referendum vote intention
– Brexit right or wrong decision evaluation
– Yes/No constitutional identity
– Leave/Remain Brexit identity
– Sociotropic retrospective economic evaluation and blame assignment
– Household retrospective economic evaluation
– Scottish and UK government performance evaluation
– Propensity to vote for five main parties