State of the Service survey data
Dear Australian Public Service Commission,
An article was published in the June issue of the Australian Journal of Public Administration titled "The Nature and Incidence of Workgroup Innovation in the Australian Public Sector: Evidence from the Australian 2011 State of the Service Survey" authored by Nuttaneeya (Ann) Torugsa and Anthony Arundel. At the end of the article, the following words appear: "The authors would like to thank Tony Cotton and David Schmidtchen of the Australian Public Service Commission for ... providing access to the data."
The data in question relate to the 2011 State-of-the-Service survey and, in particular, to the questionnaire at https://resources.apsc.gov.au/2011/ESR10...
I request, under administrative arrangements if possible but otherwise under the Freedom of Information Act, an electronic copy of the electronic data file that was provided to the authors of the article described above.
Yours faithfully,
Mark R. Diamond
Dear Mr Diamond
Thank you for your message of 25 November 2016. I am writing to
acknowledge receipt of your request for access to documents under the
Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act). The statutory timeframe for
responding to your request is 30 days from the date of receipt. In
certain circumstances this timeframe may be extended. We will advise you
if these circumstances arise.
Regards
____________________________________________________
Chris Luton
Australian Public Service Commission
p : 02 6202 3571 | f : 02 6250 4437
e : [email address] | w : www.apsc.gov.au
Dear Mr Diamond
I refer to your email message of 25 November 2016 requesting a copy of data collected in response to the Australian Public Service Commission's 2011 State of the Service Survey. The 2011 Survey dataset that was used to prepare the article published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration is attached.
Please note that although the authors acknowledged that the APSC provided access to the dataset, the dataset was publicly-available to the authors at the time through data.gov.au. However, the APSC has since removed this and other datasets from data.gov.au pending a review of the Commission's approach to release of data.
The initial removal of datasets from data.gov.au was due to privacy concerns regarding more recent APS Employee Census datasets. However, given the stratified sampling nature of the data-collection process in 2011, these privacy concerns do not arise in respect of the attached data.
Regards
____________________________________________________
Chris Luton
Australian Public Service Commission
p : 02 6202 3571 | f : 02 6250 4437
e : [email address] | w : www.apsc.gov.au
Dear FOI,
Thank you very (very) much for the copy of the spreadsheet I asked for and also for the information about its history and that of the results of the other State-of-the-Service surveys.
Regards,
Mark R. Diamond
Mark R. Diamond left an annotation ()
The information about the background to the survey and its release on data.gov.au was interesting and helpful. As a point of verification, it is worth noting that the spreadsheet contains the responses of 10,222 respondents. This accords with the information in the article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12095 ) that I mentioned in my request. In that article, the authors remark that: "[The] survey was sent to a random sample of 17326 employees out of the population of 164832 Federal Government employees. A small number of employees working in agencies with less than 100 staff were excluded to protect respondents’ confidentiality.... The response rate is 59%, with 10222 responses."
My guess is that it would have been much more of a hassle for the Australian Public Service Commission had I insisted that they deal with the request as a Freedom of Information request under the Act. Asking them to consider the possibility of releasing the data under administrative arrangements probably allowed for a much simpler process.