In the annual Understanding Society surveys participants are asked about their current situation, at the time of their interview. For some life domains, such as education, employment, partnerships and fertility, participants are also asked about events that they have experienced since their previous annual interview. The amount of information that can be collected in this way is limited, partly because of the amount of other information that is being collected in the survey and partly because people’s recall of past events is not always reliable.
The Understanding Society Life Events Survey as designed to test ways of collecting information about life changes, closer in time to when they occur. The Innovation Panel was used, and throughout 2020 a monthly Life Events survey was sent to participants who had internet access. Each month participants were sent a text message or email inviting them to complete a simple yes/no question about whether they had experienced any of the following events in the last month:
- been diagnosed with a new health condition, or gone to hospital as an outpatient
- they or their partner had a pregnancy confirmed
- changed jobs, started or stopped working
- moved house
- stopped or started living with a partner
If the participant answered ‘yes’ to any of these options, follow up questions were then asked about the experience.
Download the Life Events study data
Data from the study is now available from the UK Data Service: Understanding Society: Innovation Panel Life Events Study, 2020
Researchers can link the data from the Life Events study to answers participants have given in previous (and future) waves of the annual Innovation Panel survey. You can read more information about the study in the User Guide.
Designing the study
The design of the Life Events survey was based on qualitative research with Innovation Panel participants to explore whether sample members would be willing to complete extra surveys about life events. You can read more about the methodological work underpinning the study in the following Working Papers:
- The acceptability and feasibility of asking monthly ‘life-event’ questions in between waves of a panel study
- Event-triggered data collection
- Understanding Society Innovation Panel Wave 13: results from methodological experiments
