New projects and funding

Professor Brienna PerelliHarris, Dr Olga Maslovskaya and Professor Ann Berrington at the University of Southampton have been successful in gaining ESRC funding for a new project which aims to better understand how young and mid-life adults in the UK are transitioning to adulthood, forming partnerships and families, and coping with recent economic, social, and political uncertainty.

To achieve this, the study team will collect high quality data using the UK Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), part of a global data collection infrastructure focused on population and family dynamics.

This project proposes to collect the UK version of the nationally representative, longitudinal GGS, which has never before been conducted in the UK, omitting the UK from many cross-national comparisons. The GGS is one of the main outputs of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), an international Research Infrastructure supported by the European Commission. Over the past 20 years, the GGP has collected survey data in 25 countries in Europe and beyond. The GGP has recently launched a new round of surveys, called GGS2020, to understand how families have been changing over the past two decades. The survey has the flexibility to implement UK-specific questions, for example attitudes towards Brexit. The UK GGS data collection will also be a unique resource for understanding how people are coping with the fall-out from the virus, as well as the longer-term impact on demographic behaviour.

Professor Perelli-Harris comments: “Family life in the UK has been rapidly changing over the past decades. At the same time, economic and political uncertainty has increased, impacting employment stability and social mobility. The recent Covid-19 epidemic has placed an unprecedented strain on families, by limiting economic resources, reorganising how families care for their children, and temporarily halting social life. Young adults have been particularly hard hit, with a higher percent facing unemployment, difficulties with housing, and economic precarity. These new conditions raise questions about how young and middle-aged adults are forming families, maintaining partnerships, and making decisions about childbearing.”

She continues: “The UK GGS will fill a gap in internationally comparable information about early adulthood and mid-life (ages 18-59), which will complement and supplement existing UK data sources. Current data sources do not capture the complexity of family events, or miss those born throughout the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s who have been experiencing the most intense employment and family changes, or underrepresent lone mothers, separating, and blended families. The UK therefore lacks a comprehensive source of data to examine families in the new millennium; our new project will address these shortfalls and enable us to examine emerging social challenges.”

Besides data collection, the project will include a methodological work package to provide insights into the accuracy of online data collection, allowing for design and implementation improvements. There will also be a demographic work package focussing on reproductive intentions, fertility treatments, miscarriages, and abortions throughout Covid-19, shedding light on whether the UK will experience a baby boom or bust.

Professor Alison Bowes at the University of Stirling is leading a new project called ‘Designing homes for healthy cognitive ageing (DesHCA)’. The aim of the project is to identify scalable and sustainable design improvements to homes which provide support for healthy cognitive ageing, enabling us, as we age, to continue living in our preferred environments as we experience cognitive change.

DesHCA is funded by the UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund under the Healthy Ageing Social, Behavioural and Design Research Programme. Professor Bowes said, “Older people are integral to DesHCA and their health is at its heart. We know that people’s homes can make the experience of cognitive changes more difficult, or can enable continuing inclusion and a sense of selfworth and self-esteem.

“This project brings together a multidisciplinary team involving stakeholders from all areas of housing provision, including people experiencing ageing and cognitive change, architects and designers, housing experts, planners, builders and housing providers, to identify housing innovations that can support living better for longer with cognitive change.”

The project will design and build virtual and real living spaces that will act as demonstrators and test-beds for innovations to support healthy cognitive ageing. These designs will be evaluated from stakeholder points of view, then considered at a larger scale to examine their real-world feasibility. DesHCA has a unique opportunity to feed directly into the UK and Scottish Government City Region Deal for Central Scotland (Stirling and Clackmannanshire), providing groundwork for local housing developments. The focus of this is sustainable, lifetime health, community and economic development, which addresses deprivation and inequality.

Professor Bowes added, “DesHCA’s aim is to identify home design improvements which enable people to continue living in their preferred environments through changes such as significant cognitive impairment and dementia diagnoses.

“In the longer term, the project will guide improvements to existing housing and provide tools for future developers to inform their decisions about housing, with a view to meeting the needs of the world’s ageing population.”