About the Survey

Development work for WERS 2004

Before the design of the survey was agreed a considerable amount of development work was conducted. It began in the Summer of 2002 when the sponsors conducted a consultation exercise to inform their thinking about the broad design and scope of the survey. There were two distinct elements to the consultation: i) consultation with academics (60Kb) led by the ESRC and ii) consultation with policy-makers, practitioners and think-tanks led by the DTI. IRS Research were commissioned by the DTI to run a series of workshops with practitioners and think-tanks (74Kb). Key findings from the consultation exercise with policy-makers are contained in WERS 2004: Findings from the DTI-led consultation exercise.

As part of the development work for the fifth WERS, the DTI also commissioned John Forth at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to conduct a systematic review (113Kb) of the use made of the WERS 98 datasets in secondary analysis. Susan Purdon of the National Centre for Social Research was also commissioned to produce a report on Sampling issues for a fifth WERS (58Kb).

The results from this work culminated in the sponsors publishing a paper examining the design issues for a fifth WERS (59Kb). Following on from this the sponsors consulted the academic community regarding a specific number of questions/question areas to help inform the design of the questionnaires which the WERS 2004 Research Team were preparing.