Background to National Survey for Wales
The State of the Nation Report explores the findings from the ‘Sport and Active Lifestyles’ section of the National Survey for Wales, 2024-2025.Results are mainly based on telephone interviews and also online questionnaires.
The National Survey for Wales (NSW) is a large-scale, random sample survey of adults (ages 16-years and above) from across Wales. The survey is run by the Welsh Government on behalf of public bodies in Wales.
Prior to 2016, Sport Wales ran an independent survey, called ‘The Active Adults Survey’. Since large-scale scale public-body surveys have been brought together to improve efficiency in data collection across Wales, forming the National Survey for Wales as it is today.
Starting in 2016, Sport Wales has been responsible for the questions about sport participation and demand embedded within the NSW. These questions are now known referred to as the ‘Sport and Active Lifestyles’ section of the survey and are the focus of this report.
The NSW is an annual survey. Data is collected continuously throughout the year, from April to the following March.
Since 2021, the survey adopted a telephone-first design, meaning that questions are mainly asked over the telephone rather than in person (and as a result are administered without the use of showcards). Future surveys will be administered as online questionnaires.
Survey respondents are sampled and weighted to represent the characteristics of the overall population in Wales, equating to approximately 2.5 million adults (16+).
Headline findings and further background information is available on the Welsh Government website: National Survey for Wales | GOV.WALES.
Helpful to Know:
- In 2024-25, approximately 6,000 adults (ages 16+) across Wales took part in the survey. This is significantly lower than in previous survey years.
- Survey weights are used to bring the sample closer to the population in terms of age, sex, and local authority size, as well as to compensate for variation from target in the numbers of interviews held within each quarter. The weights reduce the effects of differences in the achieved sample compared with previous years and with the general population.
- Each year, the “Sport and Active Lifestyles” section of the survey is delivered, it explores participation and demand in “Sport and Physical Activity”. Additional topics are included every few years. In 2024-25, these include volunteering and spectating in sport, sport facilities, and attitudes to being active. The survey questionnaire is available online (Pages 156-181).
- For this report, the term “Sport and Physical Activity” refers to the activities listed in Appendix A1. Adults can participate in none, one, or more than one of the activities listed within this definition.
- To collect “Participation” figures, respondents are asked about their sport and physical activity behaviour within the “…previous four weeks”, as this provides an indication of typical behaviour for that individual.
- Throughout, “Frequency of participation” refers to the total number of occasions an adult participated in sport and physical activity during the previous four weeks, averaged to provide a weekly participation estimate.
- Survey fieldwork runs continuously throughout the year, which ensures that, overall, the annual responses account for seasonal variations in activity levels.
- The aggregation of participation frequency questions for each activity within the “Sport and Active Lifestyles” section of the survey enable us to report on the “Percentage of people participating in sporting activities three or more times per week”. This is a National Indicator(No. 38) for the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.
Interpreting the Data:
- Each section of the report provides descriptive statistics from the Sport & Active Lifestyles section of the NSW 2024-25.
- Comparisons are possible between the NSW 2024-25 and the two previous national surveys (NSW 2021-22 and NSW 2022-23). These reports are available on the Sport Wales website. Note: care should be taken in comparing results with previous years due to the lower response rates encountered in 2024-25 [1].
- In the past, there have been breaks in trend data between the Active Adults survey and the NSW 2016-17, and between NSW 2019-20 and 2021-22.
- Differences between population groups, and in change over time, have been highlighted whenever there is a statistically significant change [2].
- Missing data (for example, a ‘refused’ or ‘don’t know’ response) are mostly excluded from the results. Occasionally, this can cause minor differences in table totals. Another example of where this could happen is where a particular question is asked to a representative sub-sample of the survey. Percentages and totals will be based on this sub-sample.
- Percentages are rounded to the nearest percent, and population figures are rounded to the nearest thousand.
Report Structure
This report is structured into sections related to the Vision for Sport in Wales. These sections are:
Active Nation: a section containing headline information about participation behaviours.
Everyone: a section that explores the participation behaviours of different types of adults in Wales.
Lifelong: a section that focuses on differences by population age groups and other lifestyle factors.
Enjoyment: this section focuses on the demand to do more sport across Wales and how much of this demand is met.
Sport: this section presents the activities that are currently most popular in Wales. Information is provided for participation and demand for different types of sport activities.
Footnotes
- National Survey for Wales request to suspend Accredited Official Statistics status
- Where the text of this release notes a difference between two survey results, we have checked to ensure that the confidence intervals (sometimes called the “margin of error”) for the two results do not overlap. This suggests that the difference is statistically significant, i.e. that there is less than a 5% or 1 in 20 chance that the results are due to a quirk of the survey sample rather than reflecting a real difference in the wider population. Where no difference is noted, the confidence intervals do overlap.