A core part of Understanding Society is the Innovation Panel. As with the main panel, the Innovation Panel is surveyed each year, and most of the questions we ask are the same across the panels. As a panel survey providing a rich dataset on respondents going back many years, any changes to the main panel need to be made very carefully. One way of taking that care is to use the Innovation Panel, where we can test out new ideas and get a sense of how they work.
As well as testing ideas for the Understanding Society executive team — for example ahead of a potential rollout with the main panel — the Innovation Panel has long been open to proposals from external researchers. Each year, we run an open competition to identify proposals where adding something to the Innovation Panel might lead to valuable new insights.
What’s new?
Up to the 15th wave of the Innovation Panel (IP15), the competition for proposals focused on experimental studies, especially those related to methods for running surveys. Because we were increasingly hearing about potential studies that were not survey methods experiments, from IP16 onwards the competition has more explicitly been broadened to include both experimental studies and non-experimental ones, and acknowledging the potential value that asking new questions within the Understanding Society questionnaire has to a broad range of disciplines.
Proposers of these studies that were accepted through the competition get special pre-release access to the IP data, enabling them to start producing findings from the studies they proposed. The proposers of each study contribute a chapter to a working paper, which draws together emerging findings based on all the studies carried in that wave. Because they have early access to the data, we can publish a working paper summarising information on each study around the same time as releasing the wave’s data.
So, in November, when the IP16 data was released via the UK Data Service, we published a working paper describing the studies carried in IP16, featuring information on new survey questions as well as methodological experiments.
As this is the first time the Innovation Panel competition specifically sought proposals on wider new survey questions, we took the opportunity to think about how to make these findings as easy to use as possible. Within the working paper, there’s a short section (pp17-18) splitting up the list of studies into survey methods experiments/evaluations, and new survey questions.
Do get in touch if you have any feedback on this edition of the Innovation Panel Working Paper.
What’s in the paper?
The IP16 Working Paper is split roughly evenly between chapters reporting on experiments and chapters describing new survey questions.
The experiments covered:
- Measuring worries about climate change: The effect of a subtle wording change
- The prevalence of depression in Understanding Society
- Using e-vouchers for unconditional incentives
- Youth survey experiments
- Obtaining measurement data from the ‘red book’
- The effect of incentives on the willingness to participate in a gamified app study
- Use of a government logo
And the new survey questions were on:
- Establishing a databank of smallest effect sizes of interest (SESOI) for prominent psychological constructs
- Anticipated gender discrimination in the labour market
- Domestic workers and platforms
- Numeracy and the long-term future
- Flexibility stigma in the UK post-pandemic : intersectionality of stigma across gender and parental lines
- The relationship between employment status, passage of time judgements and wellbeing
- Cognitive reflection and politically motivated reasoning
There were also two chapters of a new type — data description chapters — that I will write about a bit more in a separate post.
What’s next?
The fieldwork for the 17th wave of the Innovation Panel — IP17 — has recently been completed, so the proposers of IP17 studies will soon be getting their pre-release access to the data to start working on their analysis. The questionnaires for IP18 are being set up, ready to go into the field in spring 2025. And the annual competition for IP19 competition has opened. If you are a researcher with ideas that could be suitable for the Understanding Society Innovation Panel, submit a proposal for wave 19 by 14 March 2025, or sign up to the Understanding Society mailing list to be informed when the next competition is announced.
Find out more about the Innovation Panel
Authors
Jim Vine
Jim is a Senior Research Officer at Understanding Society
