CaSE tracker study: Inside the development process 

Rebecca Hill discusses how CaSE designed the survey that we’ll use to track attitudes to R&D over time.

CaSE is building on its extensive public opinion research to create a robust data series that tracks attitudes to R&D over time. Our research, carried out between 2022-24, has provided us with an understanding of awareness and attitudes to different aspects of R&D, from investment and benefits to engagement and trust. It is now vital that the R&D sector monitors and responds to changes in attitudes over time, which is why we are launching our tracker study.  

Each study will combine large, nationally representative polling with qualitative research. As the 2025 questionnaire is about to go live with members of the public, in this piece we explain the stages CaSE has gone through to get to this point, and talk a little about what’s next.

A solid starting point 

Developing a questionnaire that provides the R&D community with useful and actionable information means covering a broad range of areas. As we will run the same questionnaire every three years, we must also think carefully about the longevity of both the themes and the questions themselves.  

At its heart, this work needs to serve the needs of the R&D community. To ensure it is useful for advocates, we have carried out in-depth engagement with around 60 organisations from across disciplines and sectors to understand what insights would best support their work. You can read more about their insights here. 

Our engagement has built on the strong evidence base and experience CaSE developed during the Discovery Decade programme, which ran from 2021-2024. We know the value of understanding not just baseline awareness and instinctive attitudes, but also how these link to R&D’s role in solving problems and strengthening places. 

The CaSE public opinion team is working closely with polling experts to design an effective survey that will generate useful information that the sector can apply in its work. All CaSE’s public opinion research is supported by a consortium of research agencies and the tracker poll is being led by a team from Icaro and Brook Lyndhurst, with fieldwork delivered by Deltapoll.

Designing the questionnaire 

Over the past four months we have developed and iterated a survey of just under 50 questions that explores a range of themes related to R&D, such as benefits, investment and place. We have also sought the views of external stakeholders on a question-by-question basis where necessary. There are many considerations when designing a questionnaire, but some of these are: 

• The flow of the survey. Every question provides respondents with more information, potentially priming them for the next questions. As such, surveys tend to start with broad attitudinal questions and anything we want instinctive answers to, followed by those where we need to provide more information or ask people to think more deeply. 

• Question wording. As well as ensuring the questions are clear, we need to consider other elements like the scales or options provided or how many answers should be selected. These elements impact respondents’ experience, the time the survey takes to complete, and the results, including how easy (or hard) they are to interpret and use.  

• Survey length. Around 20 minutes is about the maximum recommended for a survey of this type, to ensure that respondents don’t lose motivation or rush the final answers. 

In addition, we used a included a stage called cognitive testing, which involves face-to-face interviews with a small number of people to see how they interpret and respond to the survey questions. Participants filled in a small selection of the questions in front of us, allowing us to look for hesitation or confusion. After each question, they were asked to talk through their thinking – for instance if anything gave them pause and if they felt able to express their views properly. This also provides the chance to probe on specific issues, such as whether different words or phrases would have changed their answers. 

The final questionnaire will be completed by at least 8,000 UK adults and will remain in the field until the right number of people from different demographic groups (such as ages or UK regions) have completed it, ensuring it can represent the views of UK adults as a whole. 

The final questionnaire 

The tracker survey has around 50 questions. It begins with general attitudinal questions, such as what issues people want to see prioritised, and then questions to gauge baseline awareness of R&D before the topic is introduced. We then collect instinctive reactions to R&D, such as what topics or organisations they would naturally associate with it. 

After this, we ask about the perceived benefits of R&D at a range of scales, from the personal to the global, along with the role R&D might play in tackling different issues. This is followed by an exploration of attitudes to R&D and place, investment in R&D, including in fundamental and applied research. Finally, we ask about respondents’ trust in different aspects of research and their appetite for different or deeper engagement or involvement in R&D.