The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) in the UK: Investigating demographic changes in the family and advancing online survey methodology

Family life in the UK has been rapidly changing over the past decades. Simultaneously, economic and political uncertainty has increased, impacting employment stability and social mobility. The Covid-19 pandemic has placed an unprecedented strain on families, by limiting economic resources, reorganising how families care for children, and temporarily halting social life. Young adults have been particularly hard hit, with a higher percent facing unemployment, difficulties with housing, and economic precarity. These conditions raise questions about how young and middle-aged adults are forming families, maintaining partnerships, and making decisions about childbearing.

Understanding social, demographic, and reproductive behaviours requires detailed, high quality data. This project proposes to collect the UK version of the nationally representative Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). The GGS is one of the main outputs of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), an international Research Infrastructure supported by the European Commission. Over the past 20 years, the GGP has collected survey data in 25 countries in Europe and beyond (www.ggp-i.org). The GGS has never been conducted in the UK, omitting the UK from many cross-national comparisons.

The GGP has launched a new round of surveys, GGS2020, to understand how families have been changing over the past two decades. Funding has been secured to collect data in 10 countries and applications are pending in 8 European countries, as well as Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States. A Consortium Board has developed the instrument and fine-tuned the data collection methods. The online survey will be collected using a nationally representative sampling framework. This data collection represents value-for-money, as the majority of survey costs go to incentives that will be returned to the British public.

The UK GGS will fill a gap in internationally comparable information about early adulthood and mid-life (ages 18-59), which will complement existing UK data sources. Office for National Statistics data do not capture the complexity of family events and their interrelation with other life domains. The cohort studies largely miss those born throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, who have been experiencing the most intense employment and family changes. Understanding Society is an important resource for information on families and households, but estimates of the behaviours of young adults after 2010 are biased. The current surveys also underrepresent lone mothers, separating, and blended families. Thus, the UK needs a comprehensive source of data to examine families in the new millennium.

The GGS2020 questionnaire was designed to test demographic theory and address emerging social challenges, such as life-course inequalities; economic uncertainty; gender equality and work-family balance. The survey has the flexibility to implement UK-specific questions, for example attitudes towards Brexit. Importantly, the survey will include questions about experiences with the coronavirus pandemic. The UK GGS will be a unique resource for understanding how people are coping with the fall-out from the virus, and the longer-term impact on behaviour.

Besides data collection, the project will include methodological and demographic work packages. The methodological work package will assess data quality, representativeness, an incentive experiment, and a comparison between probability-based and quota sampling. These analyses will provide insights into the accuracy of online data collection, allowing for improvement of design and implementation. The demographic work package will use the partnership and fertility data to investigate trends in family formation over the past two decades in the UK. The work package will study fertility intentions throughout Covid-19, shedding light on whether the UK will experience a baby boom or bust.