[…] IP14 exclusively used web-first and telephone approaches due to COVID-19, IP15 included a return to some respondents being interviewed face-to-face. IP15 also continued ongoing experiments on the impact of incentives, and, as with prior waves, several other methodological experiments were included in the survey. Experiments were conducted on: how to ask respondents for consent […]

[…] of the Economic Geography of Happiness by examining the spatial dimensions of subjective well-being (SWB). Through four empirical chapters, the dissertation explores various aspects such as the impact of income comparisons on happiness, the influence of different sources of income on well-being, the existence of spatial spillover effects in happiness, and the potential for […]

[…] children and young people. We also outline why we believe that measuring children and young people’s subjective wellbeing is important, not only for its ability to inform policy and practical decisions that impact on the lives of children in the UK, but because there is validity in asking young people themselves how they are doing.

Background: Loneliness can have a detrimental impact on health, yet little is known about the association between disability and loneliness. Methods: Secondary analysis of three waves of data collected between 2017 and 2020 by the UK’s annual household panel study, Understanding Society. Direct age-standardisation was used to compare the prevalence of loneliness at each […]

We apply the sociological lens of linked lives to show how household contexts channel transitions to self-employment in ways strongly differentiated by gender. We investigate the impact of demographic transitions to marriage, cohabitation and having children on the transition to self-employment using fixed-effects models on 10 waves of the UK’s nationally representative survey, Understanding […]

Do groups who are at greater risk of inequalities or marginalisation benefit from adult learning? Can the positive impact of learning on life satisfaction be replicated nationally? Adult learning has particular benefits to life satisfaction for some groups over others. In this report we take a closer look at how life satisfaction of specific […]

[…] people with lower levels of life satisfaction are less likely to go on to find a job. The strength of the effect is determined by personality, such that the negative impact of low life satisfaction is only significant for introverts (those scoring below average on an extraversion scale), and not extraverts (those scoring above average).