Workshop: British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and its successor, Understanding Society (US)
Jointly hosted by CWiPP and InstEAD
Presenters: Tessa Peasgood, ScHARR and Karl Taylor, Economics
The workshop provided an overview to the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and Understanding Society (US). The BHPS began in 1991. It follows the same representative sample of individuals over a period of years. The survey is household-based, interviewing every adult member of sampled households and it contains sufficient cases for meaningful analysis of certain groups such as the elderly or lone parent families.
The Wave 1 panel consists of some 5,500 households and 10,300 individuals drawn from 250 areas of Great Britain. Additional samples of 1,500 households in each of Scotland and Wales were added to the main sample in 1999, and in 2001 a sample of 2,000 households was added in Northern Ireland, making the panel suitable for UK-wide research.
In 2010, it merged into a new survey: Understanding Society, which covers 40,000 households. BHPS and US include questions on: personal background, finances, expectations and aspirations, employment, health and happiness, family and friends. From 2010 some 20,000 participants in US aged over 16 also received nurse visits and provided a blood sample and some basic physical measurements (height, weight, blood pressure, grip strength).
For further details see: BHPS https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/bhps or US https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/about