- The survey is not reliable, says Anders Sundell, associate professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.
The Health and Care Inspectorate, Ivo, has previously found that there were serious shortcomings in the special housing during the covid pandemic.
The authority now continues to examine the quality of homes through a self-conducted survey intended for employees in nursing homes.
But in practice, anyone will be able to answer, which receives sharp criticism from experts in research methodology and statistical analysis.
"Complete disaster"
- It's a complete disaster.
The survey is open online and it will not be possible to ensure that the answers are reliable.
Then the survey automatically becomes useless, says Torbjörn Sjöström, CEO of the analysis and research company Novus.
Andrej Kokkonen, political scientist and researcher at the University of Gothenburg agrees:
- If anyone can go in and answer the questions, it is difficult to trust the results.
The recruitment issue is absolutely crucial for credibility.
IVO: Just part of the assessment
IVO's research director Anders Ekholm says that they did it this way as they do not have employees' e-mail addresses. He does not agree that the survey results will be useless.
- No, because the big problem with surveys is not that people respond badly to surveys, the big problem is that people do not respond.
We have statistical methods for reweighting the material to national representativeness, says Anders Ekholm.
"Rubbish in, rubbish out"
However, the claim that the authority can weight the answers is rejected by several of the critics.
Anders Sundell believes that it does not matter how IVO processes the answers statistically afterwards if they do not know that it is possible to trust the answers.
- Rubbish in, rubbish out, he says.
IVO's head of analysis emphasizes that the authority has several ways of obtaining information about the various dwellings and that the survey is only a small part of the overall weighted assessment in the supervision.
But Anders Sundell thinks that is a strange argument.
- If we can not trust that the information from this channel is good, then it only worsens the decision basis compared to not having it at all.
"Politically highly explosive issue"
Novus' CEO believes that the issue is extra sensitive right now in view of the upcoming election.
And that it is easy, for example, to start a campaign on social media or to program a fine that affects the survey.
- The issue is politically highly explosive, both when it comes to gains in welfare and that people died due to shortcomings in care for the elderly during the pandemic.
The stakeholders who may want to influence this are huge.
Both on a local and national level, says Torbjörn Sjöström.