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...

This paper describes the problem of maintaining cross-sectional representativeness in a longitudinal survey of a changing population. The extent and nature of the problem is outlined and potential solutions are described. The procedures adopted on Understanding Society are described. The main...

New survey content for Wave 3 of Understanding Society includes social networks, non-resident relationships, and a variety of cognitive functioning measures.  This report evaluates these items using cognitive testing.  A key focus is on respondents who are non-native English speakers....

This report describes the process of development of a series of new ethnic identity questions, fielded in Wave 2 of Understanding Society. We describe the key features of Understanding Society and the rationale for asking respondents about ethnic identity, before detailing the process by which...