Understanding Society study: key takeaways and insights for 2024

The Understanding Society study's latest key statistics and insights can enhance customer research. It also helps you design targeted strategies and improve workplace practices by understanding UK citizens' attitudes and circumstances. By uncovering the drives, desires and challenges that face segments like ‘boomerang movers’ and the ‘sandwich generation’, you’ll be able to identify and respond to their unique pain points. As the latest Understanding Society’s Annual Report focuses on new employment trends, HR professionals can refer to it for insights on trends like flexible working and gender roles.

But before we explore some key trends, let’s look at what the study is, what it covers and how it’s conducted.

Understanding Society is a longitudinal household panel study, covering approximately 40,000 households a year across the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). It is based in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

The Understanding Society survey asks for responses on a wide range of socio-economic topics. By capturing socio-economic patterns as they emerge in the UK, the study provides yearly insights on local, regional and national levels. It looks at pattens relating to:

To use the main survey, researchers have to register with the Understanding Society’s UK Data Service. The latest survey was released in 2023.

The study involves collecting longitudinal data on households. This means the data is collected from the same people for an extended period.  As a result, the survey is designed to examine how responses might change over time.

To gather this longitudinal data, households are recruited by the study team to provide information about their household and individual circumstances. Typically, it’s collected through face-to-face interviews or via an online survey. Children respond to a separate Youth Understanding Society questionnaire which provides relevant questions for this age bracket.

While the main Understanding Society survey is conducted yearly, it provides a snapshot of key findings through its Annual Report. The most recent 2023 Annual Report focuses on a wide range of socioeconomic topics such as: 

In this next section, we’ll explore some of the main takeaways we discovered through the latest Understanding Society Annual Report.

While the Annual Report provides many key insights that work for policymakers, they also help marketers look at new demographic trends as they emerge.

In essence, the sandwich generation are adults in their 40s or 50s who have caring responsibilities not only for their children (or grandchildren), but for their parents too. Because of this, they have added pressures which can cause increased stress. 

However, the Annual Report found that many women from this demographic are still working. This means that they have less time for the caring responsibilities that they would have traditionally taken on.

The report found that the reduction in care from family members could lead to an increased demand for formal care. With fewer women taking on this type of unpaid care, healthcare sector industries may want to look at how to respond to the increasing demands for formal care. There may also be gaps in the healthcare sector for bespoke formal care that responds flexibly to family lifestyles, working schedules and care requirements.

Boomerang movers – also known as boomerang children – are adult children who have moved back in with their parents. Despite the loss of independence, the study showed that they could experience a boost in mental health. These adult children moved back in with their parents for multiple reasons, including:

This shows that there are multiple – and quite starkly different – motivators for this type of move. Some might be more positive than others and could have longer-lasting benefits, such as saving for a mortgage.

Marketers might want to take note of the boomerang mover trend for its multiple causes. They could help make information and advertising about their product more relevant to their specific concerns and goals.

For adult children who have moved back in with their parents for other reasons, marketers in the financial sector could provide education in how to use this as an opportunity to save for a mortgage. Not all adult children may be conscious of this possibility or, if they are, they may feel it is out of reach to them. Therefore, they could take the opportunity to present these skills and knowledge to them.

Other businesses in lifestyle and wellbeing can also benefit from looking at this trend. Tapping into the boomerang mover persona could help them to make their advertising more relevant and appealing to this segment.

One way that the Annual Report looked at increased cost-of-living was to analyse the percentage of people who own a washing machine over time. As the survey is longitudinal, it measures changes by ‘waves’ for each year. The percentage of 16–34-year-old respondents who didn’t own a washing machine grew by each survey wave. The latest survey wave had the highest number of respondents who didn’t own a washing machine, at just under 3.5%.

The Understanding Society cost-of-living dashboard provides additional data on what people spend their money on and how they feel about their personal finances. Overall, the Understanding Society study findings show that households generally have less to spend on leisure activities for their family.

For businesses looking to provide competitive leisure services and goods, advertising the price competitiveness of their offering could be key to tapping into these demographics. Keeping prices competitive is also a great way to stay relevant. In advertising, staying sensitive to the financial pressures of families demonstrates empathy and therefore fosters more trust with households struggling to keep afloat. 

While the Understanding Study is great for marketers looking to understand UK household pain points, it also provides employment insights which is great use to HR teams. Here, we’ll look at employment topics from the latest Annual Report. This includes women in the workplace and whether flexible working enforce gender roles and gender differences in job mobility and pay progression. 

For HR teams looking to make their policies beneficial to women in the workplace, the Understanding Society study provides useful insights. From flexible working to job mobility, we’ll look at some important points from the latest Annual Report and additional Understanding Society research.

With factors like the COVID-19 pandemic influencing an increase in remote and hybrid working, new work-life opportunities have emerged. For working parents – and indeed working mothers – this has opened more possibilities in terms of working arrangements. However, this may be affecting the roles that women are playing in the home – such as a reinforcement of gender roles when it comes to domestic work.

The Annual Report looked at couples who had flexible working schedules. They found that women did more routine domestic chores than men and were spending more time doing them (13+ hours a week compared to 5.5 of hours for men). The Report also found that women were more likely to report a lack of control over their schedules than men. 

Flexible working for women – and an increase in control over schedule – resulted in more home and childcare responsibilities. However, this flexibility and control for men resulted in the opposite.

Providing childcare vouchers for women who work remotely could help ease some of these pressures. Introducing workplace policies that change the culture surrounding care could also be beneficial – such as longer paternity leave.

The latest Understanding Society 2024 research looked at whether there was a motherhood pay gap. In particular, it found that there were stark differences in job mobility between mothers and other workers for employees under 30. This is an important time as wages also grow in response to external or internal job moves – such as promotions or from progressing up the professional ladder.

Mothers were more likely to switch employers for family-related reasons, rather than wage or career-related reasons. This means that the working opportunities available for young mothers may be restricted because of family responsibilities. 

Businesses could consider responding to this via parental leave policies – including paternity and maternity leave. Other solutions involve additional support for mothers such as company crèches and childcare vouchers that can help businesses retain young mothers.

Want to follow up on these findings? With our gender in the workplace survey and wage gap evaluation surveys, you can conduct research more specific to your employees.

Our gender in the workplace survey template helps you uncover:

Our wage gap evaluation survey template is relevant to the wage gap for women. It can help you find out:

Whether you’re conducting market research or looking to refine your HR policies, the Understanding Society study provides a wealth of information on household trends. As we found, some of the latest trends showed boomerang movers were looking to save money for mortgages and the cost-of-living crisis was leaving people with less leisure time spending power. We also discovered that flexible working might be reinforcing gender roles, and that there’s scope to improve pay progression opportunities for young mothers. Remember, our survey templates can help you refine your research and find out how your employees are feeling about your DE&I initiatives to date. Keep pace with your customers thanks to our market research solutions.