Survey methods in an age of austerity: driving value in survey design
Joel Williams
TNS-BMRB
Introduction
The Labour government was a voracious consumer of research data, and consequently the size of the social research sector increased hugely over a 13-year period. The new government has reversed some of this growth, partly because of budget pressures, but also because it is dismantling the Labour government’s target-based performance management system. A lot of the data produced over this period were collected as much to support this system as to generate new understanding of social forces or of the various effects of government...