A Positive Experience for People Coming to live in Scotland
The National Indicator ‘A Positive Experience for People Coming to live in Scotland’ falls within the ‘International’ National Outcome, which sets out the ambition for Scotland to be “open, connected, and make a positive contribution internationally”.
This indicator is intended to measure one important dimension of migrants’ experiences in Scotland – a strong sense of belonging. The indicator shows the percentage of migrants who ‘very’/’fairly’ strongly feel they belong in their neighbourhood in Scotland.
For conceptual, methodological and data availability reasons, this indicator focuses on migrants’ experiences of coming to live in Scotland only.
Source
This data is from a subsample of the Scottish Household Survey (SHS), a large continuous survey conducted throughout Scotland. The subsample includes those in SHS who reported being born outside Scotland, including the rest of the UK and overseas. Data on the year of arrival in Scotland is only available for migrants from overseas, not from the rest of the UK. The SHS is a National Statistics product, and the Scottish Government are the owners of the data. It is published in the Scottish Household Survey Annual Report, which can be found here. An interactive data explorer for the SHS can be found here.
The indicator measures migrants’ sense of belonging based on the percentage of migrants who answered ‘very strongly’ or ‘fairly strongly’ when responding to the survey question ‘how strongly do you feel you belong to your immediate neighbourhood?’.
[SHS question name: COMMBEL]
From 1999 to 2019, the SHS collected information on the characteristics, attitudes and behaviours of Scotland’s people, using face-to-face interviewing in people’s homes. Due to COVID restrictions, the 2020 and 2021 surveys were carried out over the telephone. The 2022 survey returned to face-to-face interviewing.
The results of the 2020 and 2021 telephone surveys are not comparable to face-to-face survey results for 2019 and earlier, and have been published as experimental statistics.
Accordingly, this indicator is being compared to 2019 (the most recent year which is comparable) rather than 2020 or 2021.
Definitions
For the purposes of this indicator ‘Migrant’ is defined as an SHS respondent who reports being born in any country other than Scotland. This includes those born in the rest of the UK and overseas.
An “overseas migrant” is defined as an SHS respondent who reports being born in any country other than Scotland or the rest of the UK (England, Wales, or Northern Ireland). This is the case regardless of when they entered the UK, or for how long they intend to stay.
‘Neighbourhood’ is defined as “the street you live in and the streets nearby” in urban areas, and as “the local area” in rural areas.
Criteria for Change
- Performance improving if there is a statistically significant increase compared to the most recent comparable year.
- Performance maintaining if there is no statistically significant change compared to the most recent comparable year.
- Performance worsening if there is a statistically significant decrease compared to the most recent comparable year.
A difference between two figures is considered to be statistically significant if it is so large that a difference of that size (or greater) is unlikely to have occurred purely by chance. This is determined by comparing difference between the two figures with their respective confidence intervals. In the case of the Scottish Household Survey, complex survey design must be taken into account.
National Performance Framework indicators which are derived from Scottish Household Survey data use a consistent methodology to determine whether change is statistically significant. This methodology can be found in the Scottish Household Survey 2022 methodology report. We test for significance at the 95% level. For this indicator in particular, significance is tested using estimate specific design factors. In addition, the sample size is smaller than for other Scottish Household Survey results (because migrants represent a small subset of the eligible population for SHS), and so a larger difference is required to be considered statistically significant compared with other SHS indicators.