We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains(potentially biased)...

Implementation of broad approaches to welfare analysis usually entails the use of 'subjective' welfare indicators. We analyse BHPS data on financial wellbeing to determine whether reported current and retrospective perceptions are consistent with each other and with the existence of a common...

Research on the socioeconomic determinants of health is often based on parental assessments of their children’s health. We assess this approach by comparing directly evaluations from parents, teachers, children and psychiatrists of three aspects of child mental health from two major UK...

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...

We analyse FRS survey data on the relationship between disability and receipt of the Attendance Allowance (AA) disability benefit by older people. Despite being non-means-tested, we find that AA is implicitly income-targeted and strongly targeted on those with care needs. We focus particularly...

What makes you popular among your high-school peers? And what are the labor market returns to popularity? We investigate these questions using an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nom- inations received from schoolmates. We provide novel...

Surveys differ in the way they measure satisfaction and happiness, so comparative research findings are vulnerable to distortion by survey design differences. We examine this using the British Household Panel Survey, exploiting its changes in question design and parallel use of different...

Survey respondents often use simple strategies to answer retrospective questions about their level of consumption expenditure, resulting in the heaping of data at certain round numbers. In the panel context, wave-to-wave ‘leaping’ from one ‘heap’ to another can distort...