Wave 2 COVID-19 survey content and data
Wave 2 of the COVID-19 Survey in Five National Longitudinal Studies took place in September and October 2020 collecting information from over 25,000 participants across five longitudinal studies. In this section find out about the content of Wave 2, response rates and how to access the data.
Accessing the data
The data from the four CLS studies taking part (the Millennium Cohort Study, Next Steps, the 1970 British Cohort Study and the National Child Development Study) has been de-identified and is available for researchers to download under End User Licence from the UK Data Service. To download the data (SN: 8658), visit the UK Data Service website. The data are also available from each of the main pages for the four studies on the UK Data Service website: Millennium Cohort Study – Next Steps – 1970 British Cohort Study – National Child Development Study.
Wave 2 data from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development are available from the UK Data Service, under Special Licence.
If you are publishing research using our COVID-19 data, please make sure you cite the data, and also let us know, so that we can add your work to our online bibliography when published.
Training videos to support researchers using Wave 1 data are available on this page.
Response to Wave 2
|
Study
|
Response
|
|
Millennium Cohort Study (cohort members)
|
3,274
|
|
Millennium Cohort Study (parents)
|
5,707
|
|
Next Steps
|
3,664
|
|
1970 British Cohort Study
|
5,320
|
|
1958 National Child Development Study
|
6,282
|
|
MRC National Survey of Health and Development (1946 British birth cohort)
|
1,569
|
|
Total
|
25,816
|
Further information about response to the survey and the derivation of response weights is available in the User Guide.
For more information about handling missing data in longitudinal studies, see our Handling Missing Data page.
Survey content
The aim of the survey was to capture how participants’ lives had changed since the first lockdown until Autumn 2020. The topic areas mirrored closely those for Wave 1 although the open text question was not included. Additional questions were also asked about health care, financial transfers, life events and children’s schooling in the summer and autumn terms.
Explore the topics covered below and compare them with the content of the Wave 1 and Wave 3 surveys. The complete questionnaire is also available to download from this page as part of the documentation for the survey data.
Our studies
