The study at a glance

Understanding Society is a major research study designed to provide valuable new evidence about the people of the UK, their lives, experiences, behaviours and beliefs.

Understanding Society every year track the fortunes, attitudes and circumstances of people living in Britain. We follow teenagers as they grow up; see how families respond to unemployment or serious illness and see how people feel about the communities where they live.

We are following 40,000 households year by year and asking them questions about a wide spectrum of areas relating to their working and personal lives. Understanding Society tells us about:

• People's state of health
• Our experiences of crime
• Personal finances
• Bringing up children
• How involved we are in our local community
• Our working lives
• Our views and outlook, including about the political system

The power of the survey lies in the links we can make about different aspects of people's lives. These links allow us to understand the life journey that people take, whether it be why some people get to university whilst others ended up in poverty in old age. We catch major trends and have an understanding of why major changes in the way that we all live and work take place.

Our focus is on the household, looking at how different members of a family relate to each other.

An earlier study - the British Household Panel Survey - helped decision makers to evaluate the impact of key policies designed to help the low paid and encourage mothers return to employment. Understanding Society has continuing potential to influence decisions that affect all our lives, whether we are parents, savers or users of public services.

The scale of the survey allows us to focus in on key sections of the community, such as older people, parents, people from ethnic minorities or people with low incomes.

With an initial budget of £15.5 million, Understanding Society is the largest single investment in academic social research resources ever launched in the UK. The study is based at, and will be led by, the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, together with colleagues from the University of Warwick and the Institute of Education. The survey work is delivered by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). Understanding Society both replaces and incorporates the successful, but much smaller, British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which has been running since 1991.

Understanding Society has much to offer, whether you are a parent interested in the world that your child will grow up in, a researcher trying to understand developments such as our ageing society, or a decision maker seeking to plan housing, health services or our transport system.

Understanding Society by numbers: key statistics

• 40,000 households from approximately 2,640 postcode sectors in England, Scotland and Wales and around 2,400 addresses randomly selected from the Land and Property Services Agency in Northern Ireland.
• £48.9 million funding (to support the first five waves of the Study until 2015)
• £27 million contribution from the Economic and Social Research Council
• £19.4 million from the Government's Large Facilities Capital Fund
• £2.51 million from a consortium of government departments
• Approximately 3 billion data points of information
• Innovation panel of 1,500 respondents for survey methodology related research
• Participants aged 10years and older
• Building on 18 years of British Household Panel Survey data 
• Wave 1 results of 20,000 participants available from late 2010 
• 35-60 minutes: the average time to complete each face to face interview

Data collection overview