Understanding Society

Calendar Year 2023 data now available - Understanding Society The latest release of our Calendar Year datasets is can now be accessed via the UK Data Service

New Understanding Society 2023 Calendar Year data is now available! Calendar Year data is designed for cross-sectional analysis of individuals and households in a particular year.
www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/news/2025/10...

New article by CPC-CG and @cra-soton.bsky.social's Evandrou & Vlachantoni:

Experiences of grandparent care in different ethnic communities offer more nuanced understanding of healthy #ageing, family bonds & labour market participation

@uosmedia.bsky.social @bspsuk.bsky.social @usociety.bsky.social

Breathing unequal air in the UK | Insights – the Understanding Society podcast

Or at Acast (or wherever you usually get your podcasts)

Breathing unequal air in the UK - Understanding Society Does pollution affect immigrant populations disproportionately?

You can also listen direct on our website

Breathing unequal air in the UK

Our latest podcast is out! @ruettenauer.bsky.social and L’myah Sherae from Enact Equality discuss air pollution, and whether it affects immigrant populations disproportionately

Young people’s aspirations rise with parents’ income - Understanding Society Our capacity to plan for the future shapes our lives, and is affected by family wealth. Most teenagers are optimistic, but life goals are strongly influenced by wealth

Our latest blog: “socioeconomic disadvantage is still a significant and systemic barrier to success”

Innovation Panel Competition is now open - Understanding Society Field an experiment or suggest questionnaire content for the next wave of the Innovation Panel.

Our Innovation Panel competition is open for another round, and accepting proposals for projects to be included in Wave 20. They can be new survey content or experiments and methodological tests. Deadline is 12 December

Due to staff sickness while Becky's away, we couldn't celebrate this transatlantic link-up at the time, so, belatedly:

How do you build a survey that works? - Understanding Society Peter Lynn, Associate Director of Understanding Society, tackles the question in an article in Nature: Human Behaviour Peter Lynn, Associate Director of Understanding Society, examines the features of...

In our latest blog, Peter Lynn takes an overview of survey methods, and says understanding and care are more important than budget

Childcare more common in higher income families.

Welsh Government uses @usociety.bsky.social to investigate childcare and effects on children

www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/impact/welsh...

New User Guide for @usociety.bsky.social with information on the geographical identifiers and geographical classifications datasets available in Understanding Society and provides information on how they can be used.

www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentatio...

Childcare more common in higher income families - Understanding Society Welsh Government uses Understanding Society to investigate childcare and effects on children Welsh Government research investigates childcare effects on children using Understanding Society data

A new example of Understanding Society’s impact is up on our website today: the Welsh Government has used Understanding Society to investigate childcare and its effects on children

Introduction to Path and Mediation Analysis with R - Longitudinal Analysis Introduction to path analysis and mediation analysis in R. Estimate direct, indirect, and total effects with diagrams, examples, and code.

🔍 Curious about path analysis and mediation analysis?
I just published a beginner-friendly guide with diagrams + R code examples.

👉 Learn how to separate direct, indirect, and total effects.

Read here: longitudinalanalysis.com/introduction... @usociety.bsky.social @esrasurvey.bsky.social

New edition of the PEACH datafile - Understanding Society The latest Pregnancy and Early Childhood data is now available from the UK Data Service The latest Pregnancy and Early Childhood data is now available from the UK Data Service.

A new edition of the Pregnancy and Early Childhood (PEACH) datafile has been released.
Bringing together info on pregnancy and early childhood, the file can be linked to the main UKHLS dataset to look at a range of child development and family topics.
www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/news/2025/09...

Is there a trade-off between diversity and social cohesion? - Understanding Society Material deprivation, not social diversity, threatens to stretch and tear the social fabric diversity and social cohesion

There is more detail in Wing’s blog, in which he says “Every time we have looked at the issue, we have found that it’s material deprivation, not social diversity, that threatens to stretch and tear the social fabric”

This research also shows that an increase in diversity was associated with a fall in social cohesion, but only before taking deprivation into account. When the analysis included deprivation, once again the link between diversity and lack of cohesion disappeared

A forthcoming paper used British Household Panel Study data (1991-2009), and found an overwhelming majority of respondents liked their neighbourhood: 90% said so in Wave 1, 93% in Wave 11, and 94% in Wave 18 – exactly at the time when Britain was getting more diverse

Once that is considered, the negative link between diversity and social cohesion disappears. Or, to put it another way: correlation does not equal causation. If diverse neighbourhoods appear less cohesive, it’s because they tend to be more deprived

Whichever diversity measures they used, and however they defined neighbourhoods, people living in more diverse areas tended to report lower levels of generalised trust, and hold more negative views about their neighbours and neighbourhood – but only *before* taking material deprivation into account

They took factors such as sex, age, marital status, employment, and social class into account – but also local deprivation, measured by unemployment in an area, and households that didn’t own a car, or their own home, or were overcrowded

Wing and Juta Kawalerowicz used Understanding Society to look at measures such as local friendships, a sense of belonging, and how close-knit the neighbourhood is – and they used four different measures of social diversity, and two definitions of neighbourhood

Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust - Peter Thisted Dinesen, Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, 2015 We argue that residential exposure to ethnic diversity reduces social trust. Previous within-country analyses of the relationship between contextual ethnic dive...

And what is a neighbourhood? One paper looking at Denmark found “ethnic diversity in the micro-context [within a radius of 80 to 180 metres] affects trust negatively” – but is an area as small as that really a neighbourhood? The paper adds: “the effect vanishes in larger contextual units”

One problem is the fractionalisation index used to measure diversity – it’s ‘colour-blind. A neighbourhood which is 80% White and 20% Black will have the same fractionalisation score as one that is 20% White and 80% Black. But these will clearly be very different neighbourhoods

One review of 90 papers on the link between ethnic diversity and social cohesion found that 26 supported the constrict theory, 25 contradicted it, and 39 had mixed results. (Another, looking at 87 papers, says “few clear answers have been reached”)

But Professor Tak Wing Chan @ioe.bsky.social gave a keynote speech at the Understanding Society conference in July asking if there really is a trade-off between diversity and social cohesion. He’s used longitudinal data to test existing research

Eric Kaufman’s book White Shift says “more diversity equals less solidarity”, and David Goodhart has written: “sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity”

Ballymena: Disorder after alleged sex assault 'racist, pure and simple' - say police Houses and police vehicles were damaged in the disorder in Ballymena on Monday evening.

When there were riots in Northern Ireland in June, politicians condemned “pure racism”, and called the events a “pogrom”. One, though, said the violence “distracts from the very real grievances” about “rapid demographic change”

Migration statistics This Commons Library briefing paper is a guide to understanding UK migration statistics. It explains the concepts and methods used in measuring migration and sets out a range of data on migration in t...

A 🧵 on the timely issue of diversity and social cohesion: immigration is a perennial hot topic, and the latest figures show “the number of people migrating to the UK has been greater than the number emigrating in each year since 1994”

...or let your ears do the work and listen to our new podcast episode (but admire the cat, too, obviously)

…or our newest ‘explainer’ case study