The latest wave of data from Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study is now available from the UK Data Service. Wave 15 gives a rich overview of life in the UK, including new content on families and the environment. You can access the full release via our data catalogue.
What is Understanding Society?
Understanding Society is a longitudinal study that tracks the lives of individuals in thousands of British households. By returning to the same participants every year, the study provides a detailed picture of how economic and social changes affect people living across the UK. Understanding Society is designed and managed by a team based in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
What’s new in Wave 15?
An important change in Wave 15 is that some questions have been added or refined to reflect different types of families and households. For instance, parents that do not live with their children all the time can still have close contact with them and play a very important part in their lives.
Wave 15 therefore introduces new content and revises existing questions on separated families, non-resident children and parents living apart, identifying new pregnancies and household leavers. Understanding Society have published a working paper outlining how these changes have been developed.
There have also been important changes to questions about environmental behaviour and attitudes. Following a review, the team decided to drop the previous environmental attitudes module and introduce a new environmental identity module based on European Social Survey questions. There have been further improvements to the data and the weights used in the study. Understanding Society have published a blog detailing these changes.
Accessing the data
Data from all 15 waves of Understanding Society, covering the years 2009–2024, is available via our data catalogue. You can also access data from the predecessor to Understanding Society, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which ran from 1991–2009. More information about the study and Wave 15 is available from Understanding Society’s Main Survey User Guide.