The Integrated Household Survey (IHS) will be the largest ever continuous survey to be conducted in the UK.
Work is ongoing within the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to integrate the major national social surveys:
The new survey is intended to increase the range and quality of statistical outputs by combining the sample sizes of all integrated surveys for a set of core questions. A key benefit will be the ability to produce better statistics at regional and local level with the use of an unclustered sample of addresses stratified by Unitary Authority (UA)/Local Authority District (LAD). Costs will also be reduced. The integrity of key time series will be preserved.
Karen Dunnell, National Statistician, issued an open letter in late April defending the Integrated Household Survey, after media anxieties on confidentiality and the possible intrusiveness of questions.
She re-affirmed the ONS commitment to confidential treatment of survey data, the anonymisation of all published data, and the separation of personal details from survey responses, so that no identifiable information about individuals can be linked to names or addresses.
Moreover, she emphasised that no other government source could help to build such complete pictures of family life and health-related behaviours, such as smoking, drinking, relationships, childbearing and contraception.
An extensive development program to test and validate the survey’s design is underway. ONS introduced the new IHS core questions to three survey modules in January 2008 (i.e. the EFS, GSL, and OMN) using their existing clustered designs. The new IHS core questions will be introduced to the 'Work' survey module (currently LFS and boost surveys) in October 2008, delayed from April 2008. ONS will move to an unclustered sample and fieldwork design for the EFS, GSL and Omnibus modules of the IHS in April 2009 (delayed from October 2008).
The household (PDF, 21KB) and individual (PDF, 62KB) core questionnaires are now available.