Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management

This report summarizes the basic results of BalticSurvey – a project to conduct a survey in the nine littoral countries of the Baltic Sea, i.e. Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), Germany (DE), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Poland (PL), Russia (RU) and Sweden (SE). For more details on the results and the project, the reader is referred to the separate report “BalticSurvey – a study in the Baltic Sea countries of public attitudes and use of the sea: Report on basic findings” and other material available at www.naturvardsverket.se/balticstern and www.stockholmresilience.org/balticstern.

BalticSurvey elicited information on how the general public in these countries uses the sea, and what attitudes people in these countries have towards the marine environment and towards various measures for improving the environment. It included about 9,000 interviews carried out in April–June 2010 in all the Baltic Sea countries.

Telephone interviews were used as the means of data collection in all the countries except Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in which face-to-face interviews were used. In all the nine Baltic Sea countries except Russia, random sampling of the adult national population was applied. The sample size allowed about 1,000 interviews in each country. For Russia, due to its large population and wide geographical extent, a separate sample was made for the population living in the two Russian regions situated closest to the Baltic Sea, i.e. the coastal regions of St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad (RU-c). Results from this sample were judged to be reasonably comparable to the national samples of the other countries. The sampling was made with a focus on the urban population of St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad and 1,000 interviews were carried out. “Russia” in this report therefore refers to this particular sample and not to the rest of Russia.

Comparisons with national statistics revealed that in most countries, there was an overrepresentation among the respondents of females and of relatively old people. In order to achieve an improved representativity of the results, weighting was therefore applied with respect to gender and age. The results presented in the report are based on weighted data.