Employment

The quality of work has major implications for long-term career progression and for a wide range of wellbeing outcomes for people and their families. With the rise of non-standard work and self-employment, the nature and quality of employment has become a key policy debate.

What data do Understanding Society collect?

Understanding Society is a study of people within their household context. We interview all adults over 16 about their circumstances and lives. Understanding Society is longitudinal, so follows the same people over time. A sub-set of the Understanding Society sample can be traced back to 1991 using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). This design means we collect information which captures the complexity of personal and household interactions with employment; progression, career breaks, educational background, ethnicity and the local economy.

We ask questions annually about people’s current employment, second jobs and non-employment – job-seeking, retirement and details of their last job. We also ask about job satisfaction. Every two years we ask about commuting and people’s working conditions, which includes pay rises and bonuses, job security, flexible working, trade union membership and future job plans. Women on maternity leave are asked about their return to work and both men and women are asked about planning for retirement.

Tips for analysts

Key variables

Find key variables for research on employment. Or use our index terms where you can search for employment variables including employment history, employment conditions, self-employment and wages.

Use the code creator

Create your own Stata code to extract the data you need from the EUL main survey. Save your variables, then use the code creator to generate your code. The code will allow you to create your own data file containing your variable selection, plus a handy set of commonly used sociodemographic variables and cross-sectional and longitudinal weights.

Questionnaire modules

The questionnaire modules show the areas covered in each wave of the Study and allow you to see the actual questions asked in the survey.

Need help?

Visit our new user pathway to explore the data and online resources or contact the User Support forum if you have a question for the Study team.

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In this episode, we discuss the effects of parenthood on job mobility and what this means for the gender pay gap with Dr. Silvia Avram and Alesha De Freitas.