Content from other sources
Understanding Society will be augmented with information from other sources in a number of different topic areas.
Geographically-coded information
A very wide range of additional information for exploitation in scientific analyses will come from making a number of identifiers of the area in which respondents to the survey live available to researchers. Details on this are available. Geographical information that is currently made available with the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) will also be available with Understanding Society.
Individual-level information
In recent years a number of surveys in the UK have asked respondents for their permission to add administrative information held on them by government departments and other public agencies to the survey data. This is also the case for Understanding Society so we can provide researchers with a dataset which has greater scope and depth than may be possible with the survey data alone.
Initially, Understanding Society will focus on obtaining permission to add individual-level administrative records in three topic areas:
In the first round of the main Understanding Society survey permissions to add health and education records were asked from adults (aged 16 and above), as well as from adults responsible for children on behalf of their child(ren). The first round of interviews of the Innovation Panel also tested collection of consents for adding economic records.
Anything else?
Plans for further data linkages are still being developed. Updates will be posted on this webpage.