The Innovation Panel (IP) is a separate survey, conducted as part of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, Understanding Society.
It is designed for experimental and methodological research relevant to longitudinal surveys. The IP contains a sample of around 1,500 households used by researchers as a test-bed for innovative ways of collecting data and developing new areas of research. Its design, content, and data collection procedures are similar to the main Understanding Society survey.
The IP has multiple experimental studies in which individuals, households, interviewers or areas are randomly assigned to a particular instrument or survey procedure. Care is taken to ensure that the experiments do not affect each other, either by making treatments for different experiments explicitly orthogonal, or by using independent randomisation.
Researchers might also be interested in using the IP for non-experimental research. As an example, researchers might use measures incorporated in the Innovation Panel but not in the main Understanding Society.
Each year, Understanding Society runs a competition, giving researchers the opportunity to submit ideas for an experiment or test to be carried in the subsequent wave of the Innovation Panel.
Since the outset, the Innovation Panel has accepted proposals for experimental studies and other studies aiming to advance survey methods. Since IP16, the competition has explicitly also accepted submissions for non-experimental studies proposing new content to be carried in the Innovation Panel for the relevant wave.
Questionnaire space to accept studies through the competition is generally made available by not carrying Understanding Society’s rotating content — those modules that are carried in the Main Understanding Society survey every few years.
