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Innovation Panel

The Innovation Panel is a sample of 1,500 households used by researchers as a test-bed for innovative ways of collecting data and for developing new areas of research.

The Innovation Panel helps develop leading-edge survey methods and content that will ensure the ongoing success of Understanding Society and generate important new knowledge. Experiments are carried out, and questions, procedures and methods are tested and used in a context similar to the main Understanding Society survey in order to make that test-bed as realistic as possible.

Participants are, on the whole, asked the same questions using the same procedures as the main survey. However, the Innovation Panel also includes experiments and methodological tests designed to develop and evaluate methodologies and new content for longitudinal survey research.

The Innovation Panel Competition runs each year and gives researchers the opportunity to submit ideas for an experiment or test to be carried out in the subsequent wave or waves of the Innovation Panel. Experiments address a wide range of social science questions or methodological experiments. 

Data from the Innovation Panel is available to academics and researchers for both methodological and substantive research.

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