Wave 15 focussed on family content and the changing concept of families and households and new data collection on people’s environmental behaviours and attitudes. Specifically, separated families, including identification and understanding dynamics, child development, non-resident children or parents, capturing new pregnancies and collecting information at different points in the pregnancy. To focus on family content families with key stage children had longer interviews and were offered an incentive. For everyone else the questionnaire length remained the same.
A summary of all changes to questions since Wave 15 is detailed in the Wave 15 Module summary table. The table lists the modules in the order they were asked within the Wave 15 questionnaire and includes when the modules were last asked.
The long-term content plan lists the Waves in which all the modules were last asked and when they will be asked again.
New modules for Wave 15 include:
- current pregnancies
- family incentive
- guardians
- environmental identity
The annual event history module (containing the same content) is now asked in 6 separate modules:
- annual employment history
- annual health conditions history
- annual partnership history
- annual residential history
- annual fertility history
- annual education history
Most of the rotating modules for Wave 15 were last asked in Waves 12, 13 and 14.
- service use
- broad discrimination
- fertility intentions
- charitable giving
- transport behaviour
- family networks
- child maintenance
- non-resident children
- parents and children
- domestic labour
- environmental behaviour
- self-completion: loneliness
- self-completion: partner relationships
- self-completion: cohabitation
- self-completion: General election
- self-completion: devolved election Northern Ireland
- Self-completion: politics
- self-completion: political engagement
- self-completion: political efficacy
- self-completion: attitudes towards immigration
- self-completion: socio-political values
Note: From Wave 15 onwards most rotating content is now on a three or six-year rotation pattern following a thematic approach. The long-term content plan lists the Waves in which all the modules were last asked and when they will be asked again.
Youth questionnaire
The youth questionnaire for Wave 15 included rotating content on leisure – TV, online social networks. Family – meals, support, supervision, talking/quarrelling. Behaviour – bullying at home, friendship networks, SQD questionnaire. Education – homework, aspirations, truancy, misbehaviour, bullying at school. Health – disability, nutrition, obesity, exercise, smoking, alcohol. Environmental behaviour – attitudes. Wages/pocket money, working, caring and political attitudes.
The youth questionnaire for Wave 15 also contains new rotating content covering the MacArther Scale of Subjective Social Status, see the ‘ladder’ page 19.
Note: Employment data (previously provided in the indresp data file) is now available in a new separate data file for Waves 13, 14 and 15 w_employment (see Changes to employment questions from Wave 13 for details).
A new weight has also been provided in Wave 15 to enable longitudinal analysis with the Wave 14 refreshment sample.
Tips for analysts: COVID-19
In response to the pandemic the Wave 11 and 12 questionnaires were adapted to capture changes during this time. Updates went into the field on 28 July 2020. Wave 13 included some questions from the Covid-19 Survey. Wave 14 included questions about long covid (based on the Covid-19 Survey) to identify areas where the pandemic has had long term impacts on life. Researchers need to take into account how the pandemic impacted the main study and consider the effects of mode transition, changes to the questionnaire and analysis of changes during the pandemic compared to the pre- and post pandemic.
We have brought together a document to help researchers explore Understanding Society changes to the main study due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 dataset
The COVID-19 survey started in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and interviewed participants from the main Understanding Society sample via a web-survey. This started as a monthly survey and shifted to bimonthly after July 2020 and continued until September 2021. In addition to questions directly related to Covid-19 (symptoms, testing, vaccination), the survey includes questions on different aspects of people’s lives that could have been impacted by the pandemic. The released data also includes the data on serology antibody testing conducted in March 2021 and 2019 pre-pandemic data from the main survey interviews.
