Understanding Society Health IP

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Understanding Society Health Innovation Panel: Biomeasure and health data collection from the Innovation Panel of the UK Household Longitudinal Study

• IRAS ID

  251120

• Contact name

  Michaela Benzeval

• Contact email

  mjbenz@essex.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Essex

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 7 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  Understanding Society is a longitudinal survey of UK households to investigate changes in people’s lives. We have previously included objective measures of people’s health – blood pressure, blood results etc – and would like to repeat this to measure change. However, the survey is now mainly conducted online and hence we need to find a way of incorporating the collection of objective health measures within this approach. The Innovation Panel is a smaller sample used for methodological research.
  In the next (12th) Innovation Panel we plan to assess the value of participants measuring different aspects of their own health (including collecting biological samples). Participants will be randomly allocated to three groups: data collection in their homes by nurses, or by a social interviewer or by a web survey with own sample collection. Across each group height, weight, blood pressure, accelerometry to measure physical activity, and biological samples (dried blood spots and hair) will be collected to compare the uptake, quality and cost of different methods. Depending on which interview participants have, we would expect it to last for 55-85 minutes. A random set of participants will be offered feedback from their blood results to see if this influences them giving a blood sample. We will record parts of the interview, and follow up a random set of participants to ask about their experiences of taking part, and/or reasons for not taking part. This project will develop valuable lessons about effective ways of collecting objective health measures to build into the future design of Understanding Society, as well as share with the wider research community.

  As well as the research proposed here, anonymised data will be deposited in the UK Data Archive to enable further research from this study.

• REC name

  East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  19/EE/0146

• Date of REC Opinion

  18 Jun 2019

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion