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 reports the design and outcomes of a pilot study for the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), Understanding Society to develop and test the collection of biomeasures by trained non-clinical interviewers. Additional objectives were to assess the data quality and reactions of...

Targeted response inducement strategies involve varying features of survey design between sample subgroups in a way that is anticipated to achieve the best trade-off between costs and non-response. The features could include prenotification letters, incentives, between-wave mailings, website...

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...