You asked
With reference to the following link:
I understand that the monthly sample includes 2,010 people.
How have you extrapolated from a sample size of 2,010 that 62% of people have returned to commuting. 2,010 people out of a population of 32,979,000 people seems a very small sample size to draw any conclusions. This is 0.006% of the population. What is the margin of error for the 62% with such a small sample size representing such a large population?
The monthly sample size is 2,010. How many people returned survey data this past month, which fed into the calculation of 62%? What jobs are the sample size people doing? Are they location centred – like Pizza Delivery, Dog grooming, Teacher?
We said
Thank you for your questions regarding estimates on travelling to work from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey.
The Opinions and Lifestyle Survey samples between 2,010 and 2,500 adults in Great Britain each week. These adults come from across Great Britain and are randomly selected from respondents to other ONS surveys that have consented to be contacted again. Responses are then weighted so that the survey becomes representative of the GB population by: sex by age, region, housing tenure, highest qualification, employment status, National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) group and to account for non-response from those that were contacted, but did not complete the survey.
As with every survey, the results are estimates and will have an associated margin of error. The main reference tables published each week alongside the following bulletin, Coronavirus and the Social Impacts on Great Britain, contain both the central estimates and associated confidence intervals for each question to reflect the uncertainty. More information on confidence intervals is available on the our website via the following link: Confidence Interval.
The 62% in our 17 September release reflects the percentage of working adults that said they had left their home to travel to and from work at any point in the past 7 days. This will include those travelling on public transport, but also those using their own transport, such as a car or van and those walking or cycling. It includes those that have travelled once during the week or multiple times and travel of any distance is included.
During this week, we sampled 2500 adults and achieved a 68% response rate of 1,694 individuals. For that particular question, we asked 880 working adults, which is weighted to 31,972, 857 adults in Britain.
Unfortunately, we do not hold data pertaining to the type of profession of the survey respondents.