Survey services

Tender description

A 2+1 year quarterly rolling, Welsh and English language bilingual survey (primarily telephone with some face to face interviews) of up to 24 000 individuals assisted by the ESF Programme in Wales. Note: The authority is using eTenderwales to carry out this procurement process. To obtain further information record your interest on Sell2Wales at http://www.sell2wales.gov.wales/search/search_switch.aspx?ID=41235 The aim of the contract is to provide WEFO and its partner organisations with timely, robust information on the outcomes of the European Social Fund for people across Wales. The information must be provided in an accessible format which can be shared and analysed by a wide range of stakeholders at programme, priority, specific objective, operation ‘type’ and individual operation level using a variety of evaluation methods. The aims of the contract will be achieved through conducting the ESF Participants Survey on a quarterly rolling basis with randomly selected individuals supported by ESF and recorded as ESF participants through the WEFO participant databases. The main objectives are: — to achieve a minimum combined sample size (including both telephone and face-to-face interviews) of 6,000 ESF respondents annually (16-17, 17-18,18-19); — to achieve an additional 4 000 respondents in the first survey year. This should cover participants from the last years of the 2007-13 programmes and participants from the first year of the 2014-20 programmes; — to achieve a sufficient number of responses from each operation within the sample to allow sub-group analysis at operation level. This will be required by end 2017 for some operations; — to ensure that the telephone and face to face survey data are collected in a way that means the results can be incorporated into a single dataset, minimising any mode effects; — to design the survey in such a way that will allow ‘boosts’ to the number of participants surveyed or additional questions for particular operations (where the design of that operation's outcome evaluation will require a larger quantity of data and / or questions not covered by the main survey); — to achieve a representative sample at investment priority level (which is an EC requirement) and ideally at operation level (to allow robust operation evaluations), for each of the key indicators across multiple variables (those related to gender, employment status, age, level of education and household situation — also including specific disadvantages and geographical location where relevant); — as well as providing annual estimates, for the survey to be sufficiently representative within quarters to support estimates based on each quarter of fieldwork; — to collect high-quality data and to achieve a response rate which is equal to or exceeds those obtained for surveys with similar designs (previous ESF surveys have achieved a response rate of 40 % to 50 %); — for the survey to be based on the questionnaire used in the 2007-13 programme, but in a modular format, capable of collecting different modules of data from different groups of participants; — to be flexible and responsive to changing policy priorities through the potential adaptation / addition of survey modules between quarterly surveys; — to deliver final, bilingual, weighted datasets and data summaries at operation, specific objective, investment priority, priority axis and programme level within six weeks of the completion of each 4 week fieldwork period. Data summaries will be presented for responses achieved in that quarter and cumulatively for the fieldwork year; — for the data to collected, handled and delivered in a manner which meets all requirements of the Welsh Government data sharing and data security protocols; — for all aspects of the survey and survey outputs to meet the Welsh Language Standards, treating the Welsh Language on the basis of equality with the English Language. The contract for the survey will be managed by the Research. Monitoring and Evaluation Team within WEFO, referred to throughout this Invitation to Tender (ITT) as ‘the Client’.