The Centre for Social Survey Transformation will focus on moving surveys from face-to-face to a web-first or mixed-mode design as part of attempts to make them more responsive and flexible.

NatCen said that while the majority of high-quality surveys in the UK are carried out face-to-face, changing societal expectation and rising costs mean that more agile and affordable data collection methods were increasingly  being considered by survey commissioners.

NatCen has a long history with push-to-web survey methods – in which a random sample of people are invited to complete an internet questionnaire – with a prototype version of the European Social Survey introduced in 2012.

The organisation has since changed several large-scale surveys into push-to-web surveys, including the National Travel Attitudes Survey, the Bike Life survey series, the Public Confidence in Official Statistics survey and the British Social Attitudes survey.

Peter Cornick, director of NatCen’s Centre for Social Survey Transformation, said: “We are excited to be generating new evidence in this area, and to be supporting survey commissioners to design successful solutions for their specific research needs.”