What is the study about?

It is a representative study of all families in Britain. It is designed to collect information about health, education, work, income, childcare and the wellbeing of children. It is important to understand the relationships between these different aspects of the lives of families, so that Government policy is sensitive to the issues that families face in their daily lives.

In short, the study will ask you about:

• Yours and your family's' health
• How your children are getting on at school
• Other aspects of your children's life
• Your views on local services
• Your working life
• Any education or training that you have done
• Any benefits that you receive
• How you are getting on financially

However, no special knowledge is needed to take part. Most families who are chosen to take part enjoy the experience of being interviewed.

By collecting this information from a wide-range of people across the country we can begin to build a picture of British society and family life. This information is invaluable to the Government which has to make important decisions about policy areas such as health, schools and employment. If we are not able to interview everyone the data we collect is incomplete and there is a danger that we miss out on some crucial information. We really do rely on your help!

The survey is now in its ninth year and is planned to continue until at least 2008. This means that we are collecting an extremely detailed picture of what it is like to live in Britain today which is invaluable to the Government.

But the study does not seem relevant to my circumstances…

We have to interview everyone from across the social spectrum to ensure that the picture we build of family life is complete. Because of this, some of the questions we ask may not seem relevant to your particular circumstances. However, we still need to ask these questions to ensure we have representative data. When we analyse the data, the fact that some questions are not relevant for certain people is as interesting and useful to us as the responses from people for whom questions are relevant.

We hope that you will understand why we need to ask these questions - it is very hard to design a questionnaire that will suit absolutely everyone!