DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-7083-11
title: Understanding Society: Innovation Panel, Waves 1-12, 2008-2019: Special Licence Access
title: Understanding Society, 2008- : Special Licence Access
title: United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study; UKHLS

description: Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study), which began in 2009, is conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, and the survey research organisations Kantar Public and NatCen. It builds on and incorporates, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which began in 1991. &lt;p class="x_x_MsoBodyText"&gt;For details of the main Understanding Society study, please see study number 6614.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Innovation Panel&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt; The Innovation Panel is designed for experimental and methodological research relevant to longitudinal surveys. As far as practical its design, content, and data collection procedures are similar to the main stage Understanding Society survey. It is a multi-topic household survey representative of the population of Great Britain. Data collection takes place annually using computer assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) and computer assisted web interviewing (CAWI). One person completes the household questionnaire. Each person aged 16 or older answers the individual adult interview, including and self-completion questionnaire. Young people aged 10 to 15 years are asked to respond to a paper self-completion questionnaire. The Innovation Panel has multiple experimental studies in which households are randomly assigned to a particular instrument or survey procedure. Experiments can relate to survey procedures, questionnaire design, or substantive social science questions. The experiments are described in the User Manual and in &lt;a href="https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers" title="Understanding Society Working Papers"&gt; Understanding Society Working Papers&lt;/a&gt;. Wave 12 included an experiment involving the collection of biomeasures by nurses, interviewers and respondents themselves. The biomeasures included in the experiment were: height, weight, blood pressure, venous and dried blood samples and hair samples. Biomarkers have been derived from the different blood and hair samples to compare analytes across sample types.&lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; There are two primary versions of the Innovation Panel data. One is available under the standard End User Licence (EUL) agreement (SN 6849), and the other is a Special Licence (SL) version (available under SN 7083). The SL version contains month and year of birth variables in addition to age, county variables, more detailed country and occupation coding for a number of variables; and various income variables have not been top-coded (see the documentation available with the SL version for more detail on the differences). In addition, there are a number of SL geographical datasets that are designed to be used in conjunction with the primary datasets. Low- and Medium-level geographical identifiers are also available subject to SL access conditions and fine detail geographic data are available under more restrictive Secure Access conditions that contains British National Grid postcode grid references (at 1m resolution) for the unit postcode of each household surveyed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Further information may be found on the &lt;a href="https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage" title="Understanding Society"&gt; Understanding Society&lt;/a&gt; main stage webpage and links to publications based on the study can be found on the Understanding Society &lt;a href="https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/research/publications"&gt;Latest Research&lt;/a&gt; webpage.&lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style="font-weight: bold;"&gt;Latest edition information&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br&gt; For the tenth edition (August 2021), Wave 12 has been deposited with accompanying documentation, and Waves 1 to 11 redeposited with some data edits. See the documentation for details of the changes.&lt;/p&gt;