FAQs

Got questions about the study? Check out the FAQs below. If you can’t find what you are looking for, contact us. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have.

In this section

Age 32 Survey

Got questions about the Age 32 Survey? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

Why am I unique?

Why are Next Steps study members so special? Life for your generation is different to the lives of your parents and grandparents and to the lives of younger generations. So, we follow your lives to understand and learn from your special generation. The world around you has been changing fast. You’re the last generation to remember life […]

Taking part

What will you ask me about? At each survey, we’ll ask you about things that are relevant to your lives. When you were younger, we asked you about school, friends, family life and your hopes for the future. Now you are older, we’ll ask you about things like work, health, whether you get married or […]

Keeping in touch

What sort of information will you send me? We will write to you regularly with updates about Next Steps, to make sure you know what is coming up, what we’ve learned and how the study has made a difference. Before each survey, we’ll write to you to tell you everything you need to know about […]

How we find you

How do you find us if we move? We need to keep in touch with as many of you as possible to make sure Next Steps continues to represent the diversity of your generation. So, if we find out that you’ve moved, we will try to find out your new address. We first try to […]

Privacy and data protection

Adding other information

Do you add any other information to my data? Information from administrative records held by Government departments and agencies Government departments and agencies hold information about people, which they use for administrative purposes. From time to time, we add information from these routine administrative records to the study data. We only do this if we […]

Making the data available for research

Where do researchers go to get the study data? We deposit your de-identified survey responses with the UK Data Service, based at the University of Essex, and the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration, based at the University of Bristol (with data securely hosted by Swansea University). Making the study data available through these central data stores […]

About social research

What is social research? Social research is research conducted by social scientists, such as anthropologists, economists, psychologists and sociologists. It aims to understand human behaviour, mental processes, and how people interact in society. Researchers apply different statistical methods to data in order to do this. The objective of their research is to understand how and […]