Understanding Society User Support

Dear Roxana,

Many thanks for your enquiry - the team is looking into it and will get back to you as soon as we can.

Best wishes, Victoria.

On behalf of the Understanding Society data user support team.

Dear Roxana,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you.

Your first place to look would be in our long term content plan: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/long-term-content-plan

Here you can see what content/ modules are carried in which waves, and you can see the titles of the different modules that we carry. After that, you can look at the detailed content of our questionnaires: we currently have data (and online data documentation) available up to wave 6 (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation) but the website also has questionnaires up to wave 9 available, so you can see what will be coming up in future waves (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/questionnaires).

Without knowing more about your research we can’t answer your queries fully, and in particular for questions a) and d) we’re not quite sure what you are asking.

For b), we can point you to the work conditions module (carried every other wave), which has questions on the level of autonomy at work and how people do their jobs (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/wave/6/questionnaire-module/workconditions_w6)
There is also a “block” of other employment-related modules which may be of interest, which you can find details of online – for example current employment, employees and self-employment, and second jobs.

For c), we ask questions about savings behaviour, subjective evaluations etc. At the individual level you could look at the Household Finance module (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/wave/6/questionnaire-module/householdfinances_w6) and at the household level we also ask questions annually about savings behaviour.

For e) we asked about the “Big 5” personality traits at wave 3 (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/dataset-documentation/wave/3/questionnaire-module/scabig5_w3)

We hope this helps – your starting point would be the long term content plan, and then you can browse through the questionnaires and modules in detail to see the types of questions that we ask and at which waves.

Best wishes, Victoria