Wave 8 of the Understanding Society Innovation Panel (IP) featuring data from interviews with over 2,000 adults has now be released and can be downloaded from the UK Data Service (UKDS).
The Innovation Panel is a longitudinal survey designed for researchers to use as a test-bed for innovative ways of collecting data and developing new research areas. The latest data release, (IP8) used a mixed-mode design, which included both online and face-to-face interviews.
The Innovation Panel conducts multiple experiments and methodological tests each year which are submitted by researchers worldwide. The next call for proposals will be launched in February 2017.
The Innovation Panel team has published a new working paper which summarises the results of experiments and methodological tests: Understanding Society Innovation Panel Wave 8: Results from Methodological Experiments
Tarek Al Baghal, Research Fellow and Editor of the working paper said,
“In the eighth wave of the Innovation Panel, there were a number of experiments conducted to explore innovative ways to improve questionnaire design. Two experiments used item count techniques to measure attitudes about sensitive topics, while others examined collecting information from interviewers about the health of respondents, personalizing the questions asked to make the survey more interesting to respondents, and the impact of how scales are presented. Additionally, the eighth wave continued an experiment to test the effects of varying the amount of incentives offered to respondents in advance of fieldwork.”
Breakdown of the experiments in wave 8
- Masking opposition to immigration: an experimental approach to understand the dynamics of social desirability bias (Mathew J. Creighton and Amaney Jamal)
- A comparison of self-reported sexual identity using direct and indirect questioning (Alessandra Gaia and Noah Uhrig)
- Separating systematic measurement error components using MTMM in longitudinal studies (Alexandru Cernat and Daniel Oberski)
- Examining the Validity of Interviewers’ Ratings of Respondents’ Health (Dana Garbarski, Nora Cate Schaeffer and Jennifer Dykema)
- The impact of interesting questions on attrition (Olena Kaminska and Peter Lynn)
- The Impact of Response Scale Direction on Survey Responses (Ting Yanand Florian Keusch)
- Respondent Incentives (Peter Lynn)
To download Understanding Society data, you must register with the UKDS. Find full details about accessing Understanding Society data in the Getting Started guide on the Understanding Society website.
The Introduction to the Innovation Panel using Stata course is now online. Find out more about other training opportunities for using Understanding Society data here.