The unit investigated is the legal unit. The answers therefore concern the whole company, not its establishments. The location entered in the survey file is the location of the head office establishment.
Regional statistics should take into account their respective accuracies. See the tables provided in the accuracy indicators file.

The results of the 2016 survey can be compared to those of the 2011 survey with certain precautions.

On the one hand, the field has evolved:
In the 2011 survey, companies are surveyed from 10 employees;
In 2016, companies are surveyed from 20 employees;
In 2011, network and group heads are specifically surveyed, which is no longer the case in 2016;
The employees taken into account were annual full-time equivalents in 2011, they are employees as at 31/12 in 2016;
In 2016, some questions are only asked of companies with 50 or more employees.

On the other hand, the questionnaires have evolved between the two vintages: comparisons can therefore only be made for common questions, with caution because the order and previous questions have been modified, and response behaviours may be slightly different.

Consequently, to compare the results, it is imperative to work on common questions and on the same field (20 or more employees). It is also necessary to use the same definition of size for both surveys, i.e. employment in full-time equivalent. This variable is called TAILLE for the 2011 survey and TAILLE_ETP for the 2016 survey.
The common field thus defined represents 71,658 companies with 20 or more employees for the 2011 survey and 69,785 for the 2016 survey.

As a result, the results for 2016 will be slightly different depending on whether we are reasoning in the 2016 scope of the survey or in this common scope.
For example, in the 2016 survey, to the question "Have you ever heard of corporate social responsibility", 61% of companies answered yes in the common field to the 2011 survey (69,785 companies), but only 59% in the entire scope of the survey (80,445 companies).