Public and academic debate has revealed concern with the extent and implications of national identification among minority groups in Western societies. In this paper we present new analysis of Understanding Society that expands the limited evidence on minority identification. Drawing on...

This report describes the process of development of a series of new ethnic identity questions, fielded in Wave 2 of Understanding Society. We describe the key features of Understanding Society and the rationale for asking respondents about ethnic identity, before detailing the process by which...

In this paper we highlight issues related to measuring ethnicity and ethnic identity. We base our discussion on an extensive review of the literature and an intensive consultation process undertaken as part of the development of the ethnicity focused strand of a major new UK panel study,...

The overall sample design for Understanding Society has been described in an earlier working paper in this series (Lynn 2009). This paper describes the special measures taken to boost the sample of members of five key minority ethnic groups in Great Britain. A new method was developed to...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of interview mode on responses to attitudinal and autobiographical questions: a 13-item multidimensional identity module. We find small but significant mode effects of three to seven percentage points on the response pattern for the domains of national...

The design of Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study calls for enhanced health content relative to its precursor study, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). This paper documents the design and implementation of the collection of biomeasures by trained nurses in...

Economic theory suggests that when a primary earner within a couple loses their job, one potential response is for the secondary earner to seek additional paid work to bolster their household finances. Yet, the empirical quantitative evidence regarding any such ‘added worker effect’...

When performing data linkage, survey respondents need to provide their informed consent. Since not all respondents agree to this request, the linked dataset will have fewer observations than the survey dataset alone and bias may be introduced. By focusing on the role that survey design features...

Understanding Society was designed to be representative of the UK population using a stratified, clustered, equal probability sampling design. This paper uses Census 2001 data to analyse whether Wave 1 respondents are representative of the different regions of the UK in terms of the types of...

This paper presents some preliminary findings from Wave 6 of the Innovation Panel (IP6) of Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study. Understanding Society is a major panel survey in the UK. In March 2013, the sixth wave of the Innovation Panel went into the field. IP6 used a...