Involving the public

Official statistics serve the public good as public assets that provide insight, which allows them to be used widely for informing understanding and shaping action.

When we talk about “the public” in this toolkit, we mean individual people who may or may not be direct users of official statistics, and who should have a say in what statistics are produced, and how that is done.

Key definitions

Public involvement

The National Institute for Health and Care Research describes involvement as research being carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public and communities rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them. It is an active and ongoing partnership between individuals with specific experiences (and the organisations that work with them) and researchers that influences and shapes a particular project.

Public engagement

ADRUK describes public engagement as a purposeful set of activities designed to promote an ongoing dialogue with the public about administrative data research, driven by active listening and responding. This can be through focus groups or workshops, or in relaxed settings like public debates and science festivals, as long as there is a dialogue.

User engagement with official statistics

Statistics producers carry out user engagement to better understand what the people who consume statistics need from them – their data needs and their views about the published statistics. This includes members of the public, as well as institutional users from businesses, civil society, academia and government. Public involvement and engagement may be part of a wider user engagement strategy, but it also goes beyond this to understand views of non-users as well, for example around public acceptability. Similarly, user engagement may form part of a public engagement strategy, but exploring internal or institutional users may be viewed as separate to public involvement and engagement.

Public involvement and engagement with official statistics

Public involvement and engagement can be used by teams producing individual statistics and teams working across the Government Statistical Service (GSS), such as the GSS’s Harmonisation Team, to understand:

• the degree to which the collection and use of data in the production of official statistics are viewed as acceptable by society;
• how different groups want to be represented within data; or
• the language used in statistical surveys or outputs.

Even when members of the public are not using statistics themselves, data about the public and other public resources are used to create statistics. In addition, people are affected by the decisions and actions taken by public, private and voluntary and community sector organisations on the basis of those statistics.

Frequently, intermediaries play an important role in the way members of the public access statistics. In the same way, these intermediaries can also be used to reach members of the public to let them know about opportunities to be involved in improving or developing statistics.

Below are some lists of the different kinds of people who may be relevant when producing statistics.

Members of the public involved in statistics:

• Survey respondents from whom data is collected
• Public service users about whom administrative data is held
• Members of identity or interest groups that official statistics talk about
• Community members affected by decisions made using official statistics
• Citizens who use information based on official statistics as part of engaging in democratic processes
• Individuals who use official statistics as part of their daily lives, such as to inform decision making

Intermediary users who can help reach the public:

• Civil society organisations who can reach or represent members of different communities
• Community-based institutions such as schools, libraries, churches, who can reach particular segments of a local community
• Journalists who include statistics in their stories
• Fact checkers who summarise evidence from different sources
• Search engines and generative AI tools that summarise statistical information

Institutional users whose decisions affect the public:

• Public servants across central, devolved, and local government who use official statistics as evidence in policy making, evaluation and operational delivery
• Businesses who use official statistics for business planning
• Academics who use official statistics within their research
• Community and civil society groups who use official statistics in their research, campaigning and delivery

Just as good representation is important when gathering data and creating statistics, it is also important when engaging the public in questions about statistics production. Some people are more able and willing to engage with the statistics process than others, which means that the voices we often hear (for example in the media or responses to open consultations) are usually not representative of all publics.

Case study 1

Content to consider for your public involvement and engagement plan