The British Election Study is pleased to announce the release of wave 21 of our Internet Panel survey. Wave 21 constitutes the second wave of the panel to occur after the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis.
30,381 respondents took wave 21 of the British Election Study. 16,994 of these also took wave 20, an overall wave on wave retention rate of 56.1%. 626 respondents took all of the first 21 waves of the survey, 2% of respondents who originally took wave 1. Wave 21 was conducted by YouGov between 7 and 25 May 2021.
The 2019 British Election Study is managed via a consortium of the University of Manchester and The University of Oxford. The Scientific Leadership Team is comprised of Professors Ed Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Geoff Evans, Jon Mellon, and Chris Prosser. The team is supported by Jack Bailey.
As well as introduce new data, we have also amended some errors to the existing data. These changes are as follows:
- Added new “waves_taken” variable that counts the total number of waves that each respondent has taken.
- There were inconsistencies between the various oslaua variables and the country variable. As such, we have removed all oslaua variables for the time being except for the one at the time of the EU referendum (wave 9). As this variable is available across waves, we have avoided the usual naming scheme and called it oslauaEURef
- Added appropriate value labels to “paperLastThreeDaysW18”. Previously, the “No” and “Don’t know” options had been left unlabelled.
- Fixed coding issue that caused 854 respondents who said they voted in 2015 to have no associated vote choice.
- Fixed an issue where some respondents who told the BES that they had voted in 2015, 2017, and 2019 but had told YouGov that they had not voted were coded as missing despite having reported vote choices at each election.
- Merged currentUnionMemberW19 and currentUnionMemberW20 into a new variable currentUnionMemberW19W20 to account for the fact that currentUnionMemberW20 is a topup variable for currentUnionMemberW19
- Dropped discussPolDaysW2 which is now part of the merged variable discussPolDaysW2W3 and was included by mistake
- Fixed error where some respondents were allocated to the “EU post-2004” group instead of the “EU pre-2004” group on the p_country_birth variable
- Respondents aged below 18 have been removed from dataset.
The data also contains the following known problems:
- savingsAmtbW14: 75,000-99,999 category incorrectly given label of 75,000-999,999.