Seven thousand three hundred UK adults aged 18 to 59 have already answered detailed questions about their relationships, fertility, and living arrangements, and now researchers want to ask them again three years later. This matters because the UK lacks high-quality, nationally representative, internationally comparable data on how people form families and make childbearing decisions—especially under recent pressures such as the cost-of-living crisis, rising unemployment among young adults, and housing precarity. Without longitudinal data that follows the same individuals over time, it is impossible to know whether earlier circumstances (job loss, housing instability) actually cause later outcomes (delayed parenthood, separation). If this second wave succeeds, researchers and policymakers will be able to track how intentions about family formation actually materialise—or don’t—as economic and social conditions shift. The data will allow comparisons across 25 countries, revealing whether UK trends are unique or part of broader global patterns. This is primarily an infrastructure investment: the survey itself is the output. Its value lies in enabling other researchers to test demographic theory and inform policies on childcare, work-family balance, and social mobility. The project also includes methodological work on conducting longitudinal surveys entirely online, which could improve how future national surveys are designed and reduce participant drop-out.
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Over the past decade, family life in the UK has been rapidly changing, with fertility declining to new lows. Simultaneously, economic, political, and global uncertainty has increased, impacting individual decision-making. The recent cost-of-living crisis has placed an unprecedented strain on families, limiting financial resources and social mobility. Young adults have been particularly hard hit, with a higher percent facing unemployment, difficulties with housing, and economic precarity. These new conditions raise questions about how young and middle-aged adults form families, maintain partnerships, and make decisions about childbearing. Understanding these social, demographic, and reproductive changes requires detailed, high quality, nationally-representative data. With this aim, the first ever Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) was successfully conducted online in the UK in 2022-23, collecting data from 7300 individuals aged 18-59. 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. This publicly accessible data has more than 5500 users worldwide and has been used in over 1500 publications. This proposal requests funding for wave 2 of the UK GGS, intended to be a longitudinal survey with 3-year follow-up. Following respondents as they experience new events, such as marriage, separation, and childbearing is important for understanding how earlier factors impact later behaviours. The international GGP hub has designed the wave 2 questionnaire to test demographic theory and address emerging social challenges, such as life-course inequalities; economic and global uncertainties; employment precarity; gender equality and work-family balance. We will also implement UK-specific questions, for example on voting behaviour and ethnicity. Many other UK surveys, especially on childcare and family life, are based on non-probability surveys or are not directly internationally comparable. Only by comparing across countries will we understand whether trends in the UK are specific to Britain or part of a larger global development. This project will ensure that the UK continues to engage with Europe’s preeminent demographic research infrastructure, which has now expanded to include many non-European countries. The ESRC considers the GGS one of its premier international Infrastructure Investments, and it is crucial to continue to participate in this global initiative. The first wave has been deposited at the UK Data Service and the GGP hub, providing easy access for the UK and international research community. This current project will not only ensure that the second wave is funded, but that the first wave will continue to be publicised and supported. Given the ESRC’s current investment, this data collection represents value-for-money, including incentives for completing the survey which benefit the British public. Besides data collection, the project includes methodological, demographic, and dissemination work packages. The methodological work package will assess data quality and representativeness in a longitudinal survey conducted only online. It will also evaluate an incentive experiment designed to reduce attrition. These analyses will provide insights into online data collection, allowing for improvement of design and implementation. The demographic work package will use the partnership, fertility, and intergenerational living questions from both waves to investigate how intentions materialise over time, informing policymakers about factors associated with family formation and childcare. Finally, the dissemination work package will ensure that this infrastructure investment is used by academics, public, and stakeholders globally.
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