DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-7083-15
title: Understanding Society: Innovation Panel, Waves 1-17, 2008-2024: Special Licence Access
title: Understanding Society Innovation Panel: Waves 1-, 2008- : Safeguarded/Special Licence
title: United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study; UKHLS

description: &lt;p&gt;&lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Understanding Society&lt;/span&gt;, (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 Verian Group (formerly Kantar Public) and NatCen. It builds on and incorporates, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which began in 1991.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Understanding Society Innovation Panel&lt;/span&gt; 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), web surveys and telephone interviewing (CATI) to a small extent. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For details of the main Understanding Society study, please see study number 6614.&lt;/p&gt; 
&lt;p&gt;For the Innovation Panel, one person in the household 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 self-completion questionnaire. The Innovation Panel has multiple experimental studies in which households or individuals 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 Understanding Society Working Papers. 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. Due to COVID-19 Waves 13 and 14 were implemented using computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) and web surveys. Wave 15 included additional data on body measurements. Respondents were asked to install the BodyVolume app on their smartphone or tablet (iOS or Android) and use it after the interview to take two photos of themselves. The app used the body outlines along with profile information that the respondent entered in the app (age, sex, height, weight, level of activity) to calculate measures including waist and hip circumference, total body fat, visceral body fat, and lengths of different body parts. Wave 16 included an experiment asking parents of children aged under 16 to supply health related information from the child’s red book. Respondents were also asked to install the Sea Hero Quest app and play a game that measures spatial cognition.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;There are two primary versions of the Innovation Panel data. One is available under the standard End User Licence (EUL) agreement, 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 Understanding Society main stage webpage and links to publications based on the study can be found on the Understanding Society Latest Research webpage.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Latest edition information&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For the 14th edition (September 2025), Wave 17 has been deposited with accompanying documentation. All previous waves have also been redeposited with various corrections - see '7083_innovation_panel_1-16_changes.pdf' for details of the changes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Co-funders&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In addition to the Economic and Social Research Council, co-funders for the study included the Department of Work and Pensions, the Department for Education, the Department for Transport, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Community and Local Government, the Department of Health, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, the Northern Ireland Executive, the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs, and the Food Standards Agency.&lt;/p&gt;
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