The Ethical Basis of the Scottish Health and Wellbeing Census, 2021-22

This Briefing discusses the ethical basis of the Scottish Health and Wellbeing Census, a survey of school children which was devised by the Scottish government and conducted by 16 Scottish local authorities in 2021-22. It was a large project, with 134,044 responses, which was 58% of the target population. The questions asked of the respondents dealt with the ways in which ‘attitudes to school, views on neighbourhood and life at home, physical health, and mental health and wellbeing differ by stage, sex and deprivation’. The Briefing analyses the ethical basis of the Census, and concludes that it had severe lapses in relation to respondents' consent, respondents' right to withdraw consent, privacy, review of the questionnaire, respondents' anonymity in the data set, and respondents' consent for linkage to other data sets.