Frequently asked questions

Please note the survey has now closed.

What is weighting? Why do you weight the data?

Weighting changes the data to account for differences between all patients at a practice and the sub-set of patients who actually take part in the survey.

For example: what if one GP practice has many more 16 to 24-year-old patients than 75 to 84-year-olds, but only a small number of 16 to 24-year-olds actually fill out the survey? By applying more weight to the responses from 16 to 24-year-olds, the results for the practice will more accurately reflect the views of the practice population as a whole.

How does the weighting actually work?

One of the problems with surveys is non response, which can cause some groups to be over or under represented. In order to correct for this, weighting is applied. People in underrepresented groups get a weight larger than 1, and those in overrepresented groups get a weight smaller than 1.

Using the example above: if a lower proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds returned questionnaires (5%) than the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds within the practice (10%). This means that 16 to 24-year-olds would be under-represented in the survey results. A ‘weight’ for responses from the 16 to 24-year-old group can be calculated by dividing the practice proportion (10%) by the response proportion (5%). Responses from 16 to 24-year-olds are then multiplied by the weight (2.0) to increase the influence of these responses in the final results, to make up for the low representation. A weight of less than 1 will occur when there is a higher proportion of responses than the practice proportion. This will decrease the influence of these responses in the final results.

This example only uses age as a factor when deciding the weight. The weighting scheme for the GP Patient Survey includes many factors such as age, gender, geo-demographic classification (ACORN) and Government Office Region. These are used alongside other area level factors such as: the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score, crime levels, ethnicity, marital status, overcrowding in households, household tenure and employment status.

More information about the weighting scheme is included in the latest version of the Technical annex.

Why do the outputs include weighted results rather than unweighted results?

All published GPPS outputs present weighted results. Weighting ensures results are better reflective of the population of adult patients aged 16+ who are registered with a GP (as not all patients are invited to take part and not all of those who are invited return a survey). Weighted data is useful for organisations where fewer patients of a certain group (for example, younger patients) have filled in the survey than we would expect.

Unweighted base sizes are presented, alongside weighted base sizes, in most outputs to provide transparency on the actual number of patients who answered a question.

For the full unweighted results please email: GPPatientSurvey@ipsos.com.

Why do some questions have a different weight?

In addition to the core (online and paper) questionnaire, a small number of additional questions were included in the online version of the survey only (and included in the accessible formats). It was not possible to include these in the paper questionnaire due to space constraints. The results for these additional questions are included in the data tables. However, a separate weight was created as respondents who took part online have different demographics to those who took part in the survey overall. More information on the ‘online only’ weight is available in the Technical annex.

The inclusion of online-only questions is a new development for GPPS. As such, these results are labelled as official statistics in development, in line with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics. Please share any feedback on the online-only questions with:gppatientsurvey@ipsos.com.