Guest Editorial: the origins of Understanding Society

Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, is a new household panel survey motivated by the success of longitudinal studies in the UK, and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with co-funding from UK government departments. The UK has a diverse and rich portfolio of longitudinal studies including the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), based on 5,500 households, which ran for eighteen years from 1991 and is the predecessor of Understanding Society. The BHPS continues to be a widely used dataset in the UK and internationally, but as the panel matured it was recognised there was a need to look to the future of longitudinal data resources for the coming decades in the UK. The ESRC and the wider academic community saw this as a strategic priority to meet the emerging data needs of the social science and policy-making communities. The ESRC were successful in establishing funding for a new study which would incorporate the existing BHPS sample but with an expanded and ambitious scientific research agenda. What follows is a short description of the study’s development to date to provide the background for the papers included in this special section. In July 2005, the ESRC submitted a pivotal bid to the UK Government's Large Facilities Capital Fund, which typically funds key infrastructural investments across the natural sciences. The success of this bid represented a sea change in funding mechanisms for the social sciences, with the growing recognition that large data sets are the key infrastructural investments for the social sciences, equivalent to laboratories for the natural sciences such as the Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva. The bid sought funding for a new and much larger household panel study, following a consultation report carried out by Longview, which recommended renewal and major expansion of the BHPS (Martin et al 2004). In May 2006, the then Office for Science and Information agreed funding for the new household panel study. The new UK household longitudinal study (UKHLS), which became known as Understanding Society, was to have the following features: • A longitudinal survey, with at least a 20 year life, of a cross-section of UK households • A sample size of 40,000 households • Innovative methods and types of data collection • A resource facilitating research on a wide variety of issues, involving not just traditional social science but linking to medical and environmental sciences • Data collection starting in 2008