Official Statistics

1. Introduction - Community Life COVID-19 Re-contact Survey 2020

Published 8 December 2020

Applies to England

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) commissioned the Community Life COVID-19 Re-contact Survey (CLRS) to provide data on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected volunteering, charitable giving, social cohesion, wellbeing and loneliness in England.

The re-contact survey is a follow-up to the Community Life Survey (CLS), an annual household self-completion survey of adults aged 16+ in England. The CLS provides nationally representative data on social cohesion, community engagement and social action.^{[footnote 1]}

The principal value of this research is that it provides data from the same person at two time-points. This provides an insight into the dynamics of change between the pre COVID-19 pandemic period (wave 1) and July 2020, the time of the CLRS fieldwork (wave 2). The large CLS samples provided a unique opportunity to understand what happens to these behaviours and attitudes during an unusual national crisis.

While the annual CLS can be used to make comparisons between two time-points, it cannot demonstrate change among sub-populations whose composition is more unstable. For example, someone who is classified as a volunteer at one point in time might not be at another if they stop volunteering. The net number of volunteers in the population may be the same at two time points but could be compositionally different. The annual surveys are cross-sectional (meaning they capture data at one time point only) and can therefore only detect this net level of change.^{[footnote 2]} The annual surveys cannot detect gross level of change.

The CLRS, based on a longitudinal sample, provides nationally representative evidence on how public behaviours and attitudes have changed with respect to community issues since the onset of COVID-19. In addition, the CLRS questionnaire contains a number of questions relating specifically to COVID-19 which can help explain why change may have occurred.

This report provides analysis of net and gross change between the pre COVID-19 pandemic period and the period during the pandemic. These terms are summarised here:

• Net change: The overall difference in prevalence of a measure at wave 1 and wave 2 at the aggregate level.

• Gross change: A more in-depth measure of change which describes change or movement at the individual level.

The Community Life COVID-19 Re-contact Survey Headline Measures report was published in November 2020.^{[footnote 3]} This provides cross-sectional analysis from wave 2 on a subset of new and adapted questions included in the re-contact survey, covering formal volunteering, informal volunteering, and neighbourhood and community behaviours. All measures in the headline measures report are also covered in this report.

1. For further information on the annual Community Life Survey, please visit: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-survey-201920 ↩

2. For example, the net change would be 0% if 20% of people volunteered in the original CLS and 20% volunteered in the CLRS. The people who volunteered at both waves may be different. The gross change would be 0% if the same people volunteered at both waves, but 100% if the same people volunteered at one wave but not the other. ↩

3. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/headline-findings-from-the-2020-community-life-recontact-survey ↩