Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study), which began in 2009, is conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, and the survey research organisations Verian Group (formerly Kantar Public) and NatCen. It builds on and incorporates, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which began in 1991.

This dataset contains Acorn geodemographic segmentation codes (category, group and type) for each household in every wave of Understanding Society and harmonised BHPS, together with a household identification number (hidp) allowing it to be linked to the main Understanding Society data files. The dataset is produced by matching the Acorn segmentation against every Understanding Society household at the postcode level. There are two sets of segmentation codes, 2015 and 2023. The 2015 variables are produced against the acorn 2015 variant and the 2023 variables against a newer acorn variant first produced in 2023.

The Acorn segmentation system itself is developed and maintained by CACI Ltd and is designed to identify characteristics of each postcode according to a hierarchical structure of 7 categories, 22 groups and 64 types. For details on the Acorn segmentation structure and how is it is produced please refer to the documentation and the Caci website.

These data have more restrictive access conditions than those available under the standard End User Licence (see 'Access data' tab for more information).

Latest Edition Information

For the 14th edition (November 2024), Wave 14 data have been added, and the documentation has been updated. In addition, Wave 13 data has been re-deposited with superfluous entries removed.