Couples who live apart comprise a significant minority of the population, but often very limited data is available on both parts of the couple to understand their circumstances and relationship in a holistic way.
To date Understanding Society has asked a few questions of participants who have a steady relationship with someone living outside of their household, which has enabled users to provide valuable insights on this group. However, the data are limited as we only collect cross-sectional information on such relationships and do not have data from the participant’s significant other.
We have therefore undertaken several initiatives to improve our data in this field:
– Improved longitudinal data collection – Experiments in Innovation Panels 13 and 14 have explored the feasibility of asking for the significant other’s name, and from Wave 14 we will ask whether the significant other is the same as in the last wave so they can be linked across waves.
– Understanding relationship trajectories – in Wave 14 we ask whether non-coresident couples have previously lived together.
– Parents in Living Apart Together (LAT) relationships – a sizeable proportion of this group are parents living apart and international literature has identified that having children increases the probability of being in a LAT relationship so from Wave 14 we will include questions about any children non-coresident couples have together and from previous relationships.
We would welcome suggestions for other content we develop to include in future main questionnaires about LAT relationships and partners.
Another innovative idea we wish to try is to interview both partners in the couple (i.e. the Understanding Society participant and their non-sample/non-coresident significant other). Successfully collecting data from both partners may contribute to understanding more about the key research questions arising in the literature such as:
– Who are those in LAT relationships?
– Are LAT relationships an individual choice or practical response to life course constraints/circumstances and the association of this with age?
– How do people experience and feel about their LAT relationship?
– How do relative resources, (dis)agreement of norms, values, preferences, intentions and attitudes interact to influence current LAT and future cohabitation (Coulter and Hu 2017)?
– How do LAT relationships function and do they provide financial, practical and emotional support?
– How do societal constraints and social policies influence LAT relationships?
Collecting information about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these relationships can also provide an insight into the impact of law and policies on this group, which some have argued were overlooked by early covid measures in the UK.
In order to investigate the feasibility of interviewing both partners we are carrying out an experiment over several waves of the Innovation Panel (IP). In IP13 we asked participants in LAT relationships to give us the contact details of their partner. Drawing on the results of this we adapted the way we asked for contact details in IP14, using two approaches via the questionnaire and by a separate letter. We will receive these data from the fieldwork agency in November 2021 and identify further lessons about how to improve requesting such contact details in the future.
Meanwhile, we wish to trial collecting data from the non-sample/non-coresident partner to be appended to our IP13/IP14 data. We have prioritised topics according to those which offer the most research potential in contributing to existing questions raised in the literature.
We would welcome comments on the draft questions and/or suggestions for other content that would be valuable to ask of both LAT partners.
Read the full LAT survey consultation before contacting the team.
Family and households
