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New user pathway

Understanding Society is the largest longitudinal study of its kind and covers a wide range of topics. This page outlines the pathway for new users to explore the data and highlights the ways in which you can use the online resources to help you start using the data.

DISCOVER

1

Study overview

The About the Study page is a good place to start and provides an overview of Understanding Society and its content – who, what, why, when, and how the Study is conducted. Use the “Variable Search” in the next section to see what information is collected.

You can listen to the Understanding Society team talk about the design and implementation of the Study in the Podcast From Surveys to data.

The Publications Library shows the research that has already been carried out using the study. Use the search facility to filter by Subject, publication type, author and year of publication.

Our Study Overview within the Main Survey User Guide will help you start working with the dataset.

The Pathway Video highlights the top 10 online resources to help you get started.

Pathway to Understanding Society: online resources

2

Variable Search

The Variable Search helps you find variables needed for your research. The Variable Search can be used in multiple ways to search by variable name or keyword, by data files, by thematic index terms, or by questions or question modules. Each variable includes a frequency for each wave in which it appears. Some variables also have notes with more information about the variable.

  • Search by Variable name or keyword to see the details about the variable
  • Search the Data files to see which variables they contain
  • Refine your search for a topic using the Index terms
  • See how the question was asked in the Questionnaire modules and any associated variables

The benefits of using the Variable Search and how it can link between variables, themes, questions and question modules are explained in the video How to use the Variable Search. 

Understanding Society covers a wide range of topics: education, employment, family and households, income, Health and wellbeing, finance, housing, expenditure and deprivation, politics and social attitudes. The Topic pages tell you what data the Study collects on each topic. Some of our Topic Champions have produced videos explaining how people can use the data.

  • Using Understanding Society for Employment research
  • Using Understanding Society for Housing research

Using Understanding Society for employment research

3

Long-term content plan

If you have found variables of interest the long-term content plan shows you when and how often question modules are asked. Understanding Society covers a wide range of topics. The long-term content plan allows you to decide quickly which areas most suit your research interests and summarises the pattern in which the questions have been collected or planned. Some content is asked every year, while some are asked every 2 or 3 years. One-off questions are asked for special events such as Brexit and the Olympics.

The Variable Search connects the question modules with the variables and datafiles.

4

Questionnaires

The questionnaires are a key source of information about the wording of individual questions. Who was asked and what questions precede and follow in the interview. How to read the questionnaire is explained in our Main Survey User Guide. Use our Variable Search to link between variables, themes, questions and question modules.

We use different types of questionnaires

Adults over 16 have an online or phone interview, young people aged 10-15 complete a paper survey, and our ethnic minority sample are asked an extra five minutes of questions.

Adults usually answer in-person, online or by telephone. During Covid, all responses were gathered online or by telephone. Now we have returned to face-2-face interviewing we can see Covid has changed the way participants would like to be interviewed.

Our documentation pages contain Questionnaires for each Wave of the Study.

5

User Guide

Our Main Survey User Guide guides you through the Study. Using the interactive menus you learn about the Study’s design, data collection, naming conventions, derived and imputed variables and how to select weights. The guide also features videos, notes and tips for analysts.

Navigate via the expandable menu tabs, search facility or downloadable pdf text version of the guide.

6

Download the data

Understanding Society data are available through the UK Data Service. Researchers who would like to use Understanding Society need to register with the UK Data Service before being allowed to apply for or download datasets.

LEARN

7

Getting started with the data

Using Short intro videos

Short intro videos help you get started by exploring the data structure of the Study in more detail and are contained in our interactive Main Survey User Guide.

Our full Training playlist on our YouTube channel features videos on Exploring Understanding Society data, How to use the Variables Search and Data Structure, What are the different samples, Who answers which questions, Questionnaire routing and missing values and more…

Using the Code creator to produce customised datasets

Use our new code creator to extract data from the Main Understanding Society dataset. Select the variables you need from the Variable Search and save those you are interested in. Then click on the ‘build data file’ link to generate your Stata code. Your code is available immediately on the website and can be emailed to you. The code will allow you to create your own data file containing your chosen variables, plus a handy set of commonly used sociodemographic variables and cross-sectional and longitudinal weights. Read how it works.

Explore the Variable search area.

8

Data management training courses

In-person training courses

Our training is run throughout the year to show you how to manage the data using different software such as SPSS, Stata, R or SAS.

  • The events page lists our up-coming training events
  • Our Webinars inform data users about the dataset and help you make best use of the Study
  • Teaching datasets can be used to teach longitudinal data analysis and methods. To support lecturers and teachers our datasets are designed to be used by students and new data users

Online Moodle training courses

You can also opt to do our Moodle course in your own time which uses the course material from the most recent training. The Moodle contains a website walkthrough and videos to explain the worksheets, syntax and output files.

Sign up to Open Essex (MoodleX) to get started with Introduction to Understanding Society using either R, Stata, SPSS or SAS.

Syntax/code for common data management tasks

Learn how to perform some common data management tasks using the Syntax files provided on the Data management syntax page. Share your syntax with us and we will add it to the User-deposited syntax page which lists syntax provided by other researchers who have used Understanding Society

Links to other resources:

SUPPORT

9

FAQs

The FAQs cover:

  • Questions about the study
  • Data access
  • Questionnaire content
  • Data and research
  • Samples and sampling
  • Questions about variables
  • Linked data and more

10

User Support Forum

If you have a query and want to discuss it directly with our User Support team there are different ways to get in touch.

Our User Support Forum is a dedicated service for our users where you can search for questions which have been asked before. If your question hasn’t already been answered, you can post it on our User Forum. You just need to click on the link in the top right-hand corner to register.

You can also email the User Support team to ask a question or request an Online helpdesk session. Search the User Forum to see if your question has been asked; if you post a question other users can benefit from the answer provided.

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