News

We are pleased to announce the public release of 'The Study of Intergenerational Political Preferences in Great Britain' (Intergenpol-GB). This is the largest available dataset on attitudes to intergenerational inequality in Britain.

Intergenpol-GB is a brand-new dataset, it was collected during an August 2022 survey of 6,021 British adults'. The survey asked about people's attitudes towards age gaps in wealth and living standards, as well as the sort of public policies that might help reduce them.

The dataset formed the basis for our recent report in intergenerational political divides in Britain - Family Matters: How Concerns for Younger Relatives Bridge Generational Divides'. (See coverage on Sky News and in the Financial Times). This research was made possible by generous funding from the British Academy as part of their Innovation Fellowship scheme (grant number: IF\220068). 

The dataset can be freely downloaded from the Harvard Dataverse, alongside extensive documentation detailing the survey's methodology and precise question wording. Researchers who make use of this dataset in their own work should cite it in the following format (or similar): 

Grant, Zack P., Jane Green, and Geoffrey Evans. 2023. Study of Intergenerational Political Preferences in Great Britain [Intergenpol-GB], Version 1.1. Harvard Dataverse. 

The dataset is of great use to researchers interested in the scale and nature of generational divides, the role of concerns for one's family in political attitudes, and the determination of opinions toward different parts of the welfare state and other objects of government spending, such as the environment, more broadly.

Particular survey items of interest include:

• Evaluations of the average financial wellbeing of young, middle-aged and older adults, both in the country at large and in respondents' own families
• Feelings towards older and younger Britons, as well as the first words and phrases that one would use to describe those in either age group
• Beliefs about the extent to which one is enjoying better living standards than one's parents
• Confidence in the State Pension and one's own retirement savings more generally
• Support for increased spending on education, childcare, pensions, adult social care and housing, as well as the extent to which one would prioritise these issues
• Vote intention (as of August 2022)

In addition to these items (and many more) the dataset also contains a wealth of information about the demographic characteristics of particular respondents in terms of their age, income, location, housing tenure, education and family size.

Importantly, as explained in the handbook for our dataset, it is possible to link respondents to our survey with data from the May 2022 edition of the British Election Study Internet Panel (Wave 23), from which our sample was recruited. This allows one to draw upon an even wider range of variables probing (for instance) attitudes to immigration, evaluations of the national economy, and more detailed information about respondents' social class and assets.

We hope that our dataset proves of interest to as wide a number of social scientific research projects as possible.  

For enquiries (or any suspected errors), please contact nprc@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.