We analyse the results of experiments on aspects of the design of questionnaire and interview mode in the 2009 wave of the new UK Understanding Society panel survey. The randomised experiments relate to job- and life-satisfaction questions and vary the labeling of response scales, the mode of...

This paper presents some preliminary findings from Wave 6 of the Innovation Panel (IP6) of Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study. Understanding Society is a major panel survey in the UK. In March 2013, the sixth wave of the Innovation Panel went into the field. IP6 used a...

We analyse the results of experiments on questionnaire design and interview mode in the first four waves (2008-11) of the UK Understanding Society Innovation Panel survey. The randomised experiments relate to job, health, income, leisure and overall life-satisfaction questions and vary the...

Understanding Society is a major new panel survey for the UK of 40,000 households containing around 100,000 individuals including children. Wave 1 of the main survey goes into the field in January 2009. Understanding Society includes an Innovation Panel of 1500 households for methodological...

This analysis examines Innovation Panel Wave 3 (IP3) data concerning the collection of information on household wealth. We compare household savings and investment obtained from four different questionnaire designs against the UK Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) and the original British Household...

This paper, 1) outlines some of the challenges in obtaining participation from older sample members in a survey that is not specifically tailored to older people, 2) provides evidence of the relative response propensity of older people in such a survey and, 3) provides experimental evidence of...

This paper describes the extent and correlates of non-response at waves 1 and 2 of Understanding Society. We examine both household-level and individual-level non-response at wave 1. For wave 2, we examine attrition relative to wave 1 both in terms of enumerated persons and in terms of adults...

Previous evidence suggests that a wave with mixed mode data collection in an otherwise face-to-face panel survey will achieve a lower response rate than other waves. But until now there has been no evidence as to whether the response rate can be expected to recover subsequently. In other words,...

Researchers often assume that respondent burden influences survey participation propensity and that interview length is a good indicator of burden. However, there is little evidence of the effect of interview length on subsequent participation propensity, particularly for face-to-face surveys....

In order to lower costs, the idea has been raised to use a mixed-mode design for the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) using Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) and Web Self-Interviewing (WSI). However, a mixed-mode CAPI-WSI design may damage data-quality because of measurement...