METODOLOGY

   The 2019 yearbook includes a selection of the more relevant data taken from the year's CIS barometers. The section "Perceptions about the economic and political situation" combines the core questions from the different barometers dealing with this subject - both from a retrospective and a prospective point of view. The "Assessment of the government and the opposition" section offers a review of respondents' assessments of the government and the opposition in the barometers of January, February, July and September, where these assessments have been included. In addition, this chapter contains a comparison of scores on the rating scale of national political leaders in different barometers.  

 

     The other sections represent a selection of the questions from each monthly theme. To this end, a balance has been sought between the relevance of each indicator and the number of questions chosen for that month. However, on occasion, the choice of certain sets of questions has necessitated more space.

 

     In presenting the data for each question, we have tried to maintain a similar structure in each chapter. Thus, the blocks on "Perceptions about the economic and political situation" and "Assessment of the government and the opposition" incorporate the annual longitudinal evolution of those opinions with a graph representing the responses, monthly or quarterly.

 

     The monthly themed blocks show the marginal frequencies (or averages, as the case may be) for each of the selected questions, also accompanied by a specific graph. In most cases, these graphs represent the percentage of each response option on an axis from 0% to 100%. However, for some specific questions - such as the average rating of political leaders - this representation has been adjusted to a scale with lower and upper limits that are close to the data in order to ensure its visibility (from 0 to 5), given the proximity of these values.

 

     For easier identification, a representative name has been assigned to the content of the tables included, referring to the month or themed block to which they belong. For example, the first table in the block "Perceptions about the economic and political situation" is called "SIT1 Table"; the first table in the block "Assessment about the government and the opposition" is labelled "POL1 Table"; the first table in the February barometer is called "F1 Table", and so on for the remaining months. These tables are a transcription of the question and response categories from the original questionnaire.

 

     Below are cross-reference tables showing variables that have the most common sociodemographic and political indicators offered by the CIS to its users: sex, age, marital status, education, employment situation, social class, ideology, voting record, religion and residential location. Some of the variables included have been re-coded, or transformed, the above-mentioned indicators. In some tables, for easier reading and interpretation of the data which are generally calculated for each category of the indicators mentioned. 

 

      Age, marital status and social class variables keep the same categories that the CIS provides for the different surveys through its website. However, education, work situation, ideology, voting record, religion and habitat have been re-coded differently to present a more summarised table of results.

     Age incorporates the following ranges: up to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55 to 64, and 65 and over. Under the ideology variable, the mid-range values 5 and 6 have not been grouped. The other values have been grouped: on the left, the values 1-2 and 3-4; and on the right, the values 7-8 and 9-10.

 

     The tables in the chapter on "Public opinion and fiscal policy" also include the answer option "none", which was included in the 2018 barometer. The residential-location size categories have been classified as follows: places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants as "small town or city"; 10,001 to 100,000 inhabitants as "medium city"; 100,001 to 1,000,000 inhabitants as "large city"; and over 1,000,000 inhabitants as "large population centre".

 

     In creating the education, social class, voting record and religion variables, a combination of questions has been used. For education, the question about whether or not someone attended school and the question that records their highest level of education are combined to create the following categories: : "Primary school or less", "Initial vocational training and secondary education", "Intermediate vocational training", "Baccalaureate", "Higher vocational training", and "University". 

 

     The religion variable integrates the definition of religious matters with the frequency of religious practice, to create three categories: "practicing believer" (includes Catholics and believers of another religion and who attend mass or other religious services almost every Sunday and public holiday and several times a week), "non-practicing believer" (Catholics and believers of another religion who attend Mass or other religious services once a month, several times a year, rarely or never), and "Agnostic, atheist, non-believer". 

 

     With regard to voting record, the question of whether or not the respondent voted at the last election is combined with the question of which party they voted for. And for each month, the political parties and groupings standing at the previous election are taken into account. In this case, the parties that stood in the June 2016 general elections are used for reference (for the January and February barometers) and the April 2019 election (for May and the following barometers). The generated variable identifies the most voted parties, and the rest are grouped in the category "Other parties".

 

      Alongside the parties are the categories "wasn't old enough", "blank", "didn't vote" (including the responses: went to vote but could not vote, did not go to vote because could not, preferred not to vote, and invalid vote), "Did not have the right to vote", "doesn't remember", and "no response"..

 

     The social class variable is created from the responses given by respondents to several questions: head of household or main breadwinner, employment status, occupation, professional status and branch of activity, following CNO 2011 and CNAE 2009 coding for occupation and activity respectively.   

     The five categories for this variable are: "upper/upper-middle class" (includes professionals and technical specialists, managers and middle managers); "new middle classes" (non-manual employees); "old middle classes" (entrepreneurs, self-employed and farmers); "skilled workers" (skilled manual workers, foremen and craftsmen); "unskilled workers" (workers in industry and services; and agricultural labourers).

 

     The response categories "don't know (DK)" and "no response (NR)" for the explanatory variables are only shown in the tables in cases where this figure itself makes sense. Thus, "DK" and "NR" have been included when presenting political ideology; "doesn't remember" and "NR" under voting record; and "NR" under the religion variable. However in other cases (gender, age, marital status, education, employment situation and social class) they are not included due to their residual nature.(ANNEX III contains the distribution of variables and the number of cases for each barometer).

 

     In addition, where included in the design of the questionnaire, we specify whether this relates to a "Spontaneous response" on the part of the respondent when asked the question and, on other occasions, whether the interviewer was instructed not to offer it as a category for a predetermined response option - in which case "DO NOT READ" is shown next to that category. It is also specified in the case the "not applicable" category, which does not represent a response as such, but the interviewer classifies any situations where, due to the respondent's personal situation, the question does not apply.

 

     The fact that some of the categories for the different indicators do not feature strongly among respondents' responses, together with the fact that the total sample is distributed across the groups generated by stratifying the cross-over variables, forces us to highlight the limitations it imposes when interpreting the percentages. The number of people (n) who answer that question by category or as a whole is therefore shown in parentheses.

 

     The information provided for the selected questions is sometimes partial, for easier reading. Thus, for example, the response options "a lot" and "quite a lot" used in some sets of questions to capture both frequency and degree of agreement, have been grouped under the option "a lot + quite a lot" and the other response options ("a little" and "not at all") have been excluded. In other cases, response categories have been grouped where the result has been deemed relevant or for the purpose of summarising and facilitating comparison. This is the case, for example, with the question on "Degree of support for measures to promote renting” where two response options ("Strongly in favour + In favour") are grouped together.

 

     Generally, the aim is to present the most significant result for the type of question, so that, sometimes, only one piece of information is incorporated. This is the case with the chapter entitled "Public opinion and fiscal policy", where only the category "very few" is showing for the question relating to "Resources allocated to different public services".

 

     On the other hand, for 0 to 10 scales, when it is not part of a set of questions, the categories have been grouped for easier reading: 0-2, 3-4, 5, 6-7 and 8-10. In addition, some tables show results from two or three questions from the same questionnaire with complementary or similar content, aggregated into a single table.

 

     Throughout the document there are multiple-choice questions that aggregate the answers given by the respondents to a list of options. Unlike the other questions, for these questions (n) represents the totality of answers instead of the totality of people who have answered. The interviewer marks all answers mentioned by the respondent, which means that the sum of the column percentages is greater than 100. 

 

     The technical data sheett so each of the barometers, the questions selected for each barometer, and the distribution of  frequencies and number of cases of the explanatory variablesrelating  in this yearbook can be found in an appendix.