Health and wellbeing

Understanding Society produces high quality, longitudinal health data that helps researchers investigate people’s health within and across families over time and place. Our health data is used to inform policies which benefit the general health and wellbeing of the UK population. 

Wellbeing dashboard

Created in collaboration with the What Works Wellbeing Centre, use this dashboard to build and download charts to show trends in key wellbeing variables. How do wellbeing levels vary across time, population groups and regions? The dashboard uses data from the main Understanding Society survey where our participants answer a range of questions annually or less frequently on different aspects of wellbeing. 

Visit wellbeing dashboard

What data do Understanding Society collect?

We collect information on general health, self-reported common health conditions and health behaviours (including alcohol, smoking, physical activity and diet) from the whole household.  

The Study uses validated health scales to collect information on: 

 We ask different age groups and demographics additional questions: 

• Young adults 16-21 are asked about smoking, alcohol and recreational drug use.  
• Children 10-15 complete a paper self-completion questionnaire about disability, nutrition, exercise, mental health, smoking and alcohol consumption.  
• Women are asked about their health and behaviour during pregnancy, child birth, birth weight, breast feeding and early indicators of an infant’s health 
• for children under 10 years, parents are asked about key development stages at ages 3, 5 and 8. For ease the PEACH data file brings this data together

Read the questionnaires to see all the topics. 

What can you do with these data?

Researchers can:

• focus on the social determinants of health and health inequalities 
• examine the economic (including employment) impacts of poor health 
• use the Study to understand what shapes health-related behaviours
• explore how public health policies affect health and wellbeing allowing comparisons of policy in the UK across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland 

Biomarkers, genetics and epigenetics

Physical health bio-medical measures (biomarkers) collected from 20,000 adults include blood pressure, weight, height, waist measurement, body fat, grip strength and lung function and DNA blood samples (genetic and epigenetic). If you are interested in these data please see the biomarker, genetics and epigenetics topic page.