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About the Survey Summary of the research design for WERS 2004 Units and methods ¦ Areas
covered in the survey ¦ Research
instruments ¦ The principal unit of analysis is the establishment or workplace. A workplace is defined as comprising the activities of a single employer at a single set of premises. Examples include a single branch of a bank, a car factory or a school. In keeping with its predecessors, WERS 2004 contains both a cross-section and a panel element. The Cross-section survey contains the following components:
All workplaces in Britain with five or more employees, and whose activities are located within Sections D – O of the Standard Industrial Classification 1992, are eligible for the Cross-Section Survey. It is anticipated that the main management interviews will be conducted in around 2,500 workplaces and that self-completion questionnaires will be returned by around 30,000 employees. The 1998-2004 Panel Survey returns to a random selection of workplaces that participated in the 1998 Cross-Section Survey. A face-to-face interview is conducted with a main management respondent, with the specific intention of identifying change since 1998. It is anticipated that around 900 establishments will take part in the Panel Survey. The remaining 1,300 establishments that took part in the 1998 Cross-Section will be traced in order to establish whether they are still in existence or have closed down. The focus of the survey is the practice of employment relations at the workplace. Questions therefore focus more on practices and attitudes than on written policies. In addition, interviews are conducted at the workplace, rather than at head office. The survey instruments have seen some redesign since the 1998 survey, although this is far less extensive than the redesign that took place between the 1990 and 1998 surveys. Indeed, the structure and broad content of the survey instruments remain largely unchanged from 1998. Most of the redesign has taken place at the level of individual questions and been prompted by comments from users of the data within the policy-making and research communities. In particular, the WERS Research Team has received valuable contributions from Specialist Teams of academics in six areas: Corporate Governance; Partnership; Skills, Job Satisfaction and Stress; Performance and Technology; Small Establishments; and Worker Representation. The work of these teams has been co-ordinated by Professor Keith Whitfield (Cardiff University). The Cross-Section management interview in WERS 2004 contains questions on:
The principal changes from the 1998 management questionnaire are as follows:
The Cross-Section interview with employee representatives contains questions on:
The principal changes from the 1998 worker representative interview are as follows:
The Cross-Section questionnaire for employees contains questions on:
The principal changes from the 1998 employee questionnaire are as follows:
The Panel Survey questionnaire is based on the 1998 Cross-Section management questionnaire, but is much shorter and collects much less detail about particular practices. It contains around one third of the questions that were present in the 1998 Cross-Section management questionnaire. Cross-Section survey: Employee Profile Questionnaire (EPQ) (560Kb)
Basic Workforce Data Sheet (BWDS) (553Kb)
Most of the survey data will be made available in an anonymous form to academic and other bona fide researchers via the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex in November 2005. In order to maintain the anonymity of respondents, some data items, such as the region in which each establishment is located or the detailed industry sector in which it operates, are likely to be withheld for two years after the date of the final interview. The data collected via the Financial Performance Questionnaire if also likely to be withheld for an equivalent period of time, in view of the particularly sensitive nature of this information. A decision on which items are to be withheld will be made by the WERS 2004 sponsors at the next steering committee meeting, to take place in Spring 2005.
Research emanating from the WERS series A bibliography of all publicly available papers that have made original use of the data from the 1980, 1984, 1990 and 1998 surveys is available: The British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series: A Bibliography of Research Based in WERS (201Kb). The bibliography was last updated in March 2004. It contains details of the following:
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