Different names for social and economics surveys

You work in surveys long enough and you notice people use different terms when talking about surveys. Sometimes it’s due to popularity, sometimes due to how exact (read: excessively fussy) people are.

In advance of a longer blog post I did a quick unscientific Google search earlier in August 2024 to see which phrases were more popular and what type of organisations used them.

Phrase	Search results	Types of institutions using them
Economic survey	7,660,000	Governments, like the Indian government Business communities, like the British Chamber of Commerece International organisations, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Business survey	1,130,000	National Statistical Institutes, like the Office for National Statistics Think tanks, like the Enterprise Research Centre Local government, like Greater London Authority and Belfast City Council
Enterprise survey	367,000	International organisations, like the World Bank and European Investment Bank

In the UK, an enterprise is a business that is made up of individual sites or workplaces, known as local units. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has data on business numbers by employment size band, which includes enterprises and local units. You can see how the ONS maps out business size in the table below.

Business size	Number of employees
Micro	1 to 9
Small	20 to 49
Medium	50 to 249
Large	250 plus

For household and social surveys, it is household which is more popular. Mainly as in most countries there is no sampling frame of individuals living in a country. Instead survey managers make do by using sampling frames of households as a proxy.

Phrase	Search results	Types of institutions using them
Household survey	6,360,000	Governments, like the Scottish Government National Statistical Institutes, like the Office for National Statistics International Organisations, like the European Central Bank
Social survey	2,610,000	Survey organisations, such as the European Social Survey Research institutes, like the National Centre for Social Research