The SORS yearly conducts a number of surveys in order to interview individual persons and households. Regular surveys of this type conducted by the SORS are:

• Labour Force Survey,
• Living Conditions Survey,
• Household Consumption Survey,
• Quarterly National Household Travel Survey,
• Consumer Opinion Survey,
• Survey of IT Use by Households.

These regular surveys are mostly conducted throughout the year. There may also be ad hoc surveys conducted every year; these are defined in the Annual Programme of Statistical Surveys.

If you or your household have been selected to participate in any of the above surveys, you are probably asking yourself why you and to what purpose the survey is being conducted and if you are obliged to provide answers. Questions of this type have been asked by many respondents. We have tried to answer the best we could. Their most frequent questions and our answers are to be found in the continuation. These answers pertain to all the surveys that are conducted by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, enumerated above and intended for interviews with individuals and households.

For more detailed information on individual surveys for individuals and households please go to (http://www.stat.si/eng/metodologija.asp).
If you haven’t found your answer among FAQs, please contact the SORS and we shall try to reply as soon as possible.

You and your household have been chosen at random. The Central Population register and telephone directories of landline and mobile operators are used as a sample framework, i.e. the list of units from which a sample is selected.
Once a unit is selected (a person from either the Central Population Register or a phone number from the telephone directory), it can no longer be replaced by other units. This means that, once selected, your household can no longer be replaced with another household.

An interviewer is sometimes required to interview several members of a household and sometimes only the household’s representative (this is usually the head of household) or a selected person only.
The selection of persons or households is designed in such a way that selected persons in selected households represent a number of other similar or identical households in Slovenia; it is therefore of paramount importance for success of the survey and the quality of the final data that every selected unit participates (since this is the only way to ensure that persons and households similar to yours will be appropriately represented in the results of the survey).

Since your co-operation is very important for the quality of final data, the interviewer will make sure to call or ring in order to make arrangements for an interview to suit your convenience.

If the interviewer is carrying out fieldwork in person, he or she will leave a note in your letterbox informing you of the call and when the next call will be. The note will contain the interviewer's telephone number you can contact if you have time, and arrange for a more suitable time. If the interviewer rings you in advance, tell him or her what time would be most suitable for you to be interviewed and he or she will ring you then.

All SORS interviewers carry an authorisation in writing, along with a photo and stamp of the Statistical Office. The interviewer is obliged to show you the authorisation. The Statistical Office interviewer may not conduct interviews for other organisations at the same time.

All Statistical Office interviews will be notified in advance by means of a written notice.

Interviewing of persons in households is conducted in various ways:

• An interviewer can visit your home and conduct the interview using a notebook computer containing the questionnaire in the electronic form; interviews can also be conducted using paper questionnaires.
• However, the interview can also be conducted entirely by telephone. Conducting interviews by telephone is substantially less costly than visiting households; therefore, in practice, repeated interviews in panel surveys (i.e. surveys in which one and the same household is interviewed several times at different points in time) are usually conducted by telephone.