Active Lives Survey 2019/20: How do you run a school-based survey when children are not at school?
Dr. Margaret Blake looks at how conducting Active Lives Survey research among school pupils during the pandemic has encouraged innovation while gathering important evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children’s lives.
Ipsos has been working in partnership with Sport England on the Active Lives Surveys since 2015. At the start of 2020, after completing four years of the adult survey and two years of the children and young people survey things were going well. Our teams and processes were well-established and the value of the data for Sport England and the sport and physical activity sector were clear. The autumn term fieldwork on the children and young people survey had gone particularly well with more than 45,000 children and parents taking part. Little did we know what was to come.
During February as the threat from the coronavirus pandemic became clear we put plans in place to continue to deliver all aspects of the surveys. Nonetheless the announcement by the government on 18th March that schools would close to most pupils on 20th March clearly exacerbated the issues. Those of us who are parents were faced with children learning from home for the summer term and as a team we had to move quickly to adapt. The Active Lives Children and Young People Survey is a school-based survey, administered by teachers in schools using an online questionnaire. How could the survey continue if children were not at school? In discussion of the risks and implications it became clear that continuing to understand the participation of children and young people in sport and physical activity, their wellbeing, attitudes, loneliness and development during the pandemic was extremely important. Adaptations were made to the survey to ensure Sport England could continue with the survey, while taking account of the ethical implications of continuing research with young people during a national crisis.
A major concern was burden on schools so the survey started a couple of weeks into the summer term and the sample size for the summer term was reduced so that fewer schools were asked to participate. Within schools the procedures for selecting which pupils would take part were simplified to make it easier for schools and to ensure that enough pupils responded from each school. The information materials for pupils and parents were updated to ensure fully informed participation without a teacher. The questionnaires were adjusted so that they could be more easily completed on a smart phone. A new question was added so pupils could easily choose not to participate. The questionnaire wording was updated so that it would make sense for children not in school while maintaining the comparability of data. So we asked about activity ‘during the school day’ rather than ‘at school’ and questions such as whether they would like to swim more often or how they got to school were removed to avoid being insensitive to the situation children found themselves in – unable to go to school or do the activities they usually enjoy. The survey ended with information about organisations (web and telephone numbers) children could contact for support. We have maintained and developed these innovations for the current survey year, giving us the flexibility to continue with fieldwork as the situation in schools changes, including during the latest period of remote learning in early 2021. This flexibility and improved functionality on mobile devices will also have long term benefits for the survey.
Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the schools, teachers, pupils and parents who responded while facing the challenges of remote learning, the summer term fieldwork went very well. During the summer term, a large amount of quality data was collected on a comparable basis with earlier terms and years of the survey, data that has enabled the production of a robust set of survey results for both the 2019/20 academic year and the 2020 summer term. Response was particularly good among secondary school pupils, perhaps because they were used to receiving online tasks to complete at home. We are very pleased to have been involved in this important survey which sheds light on young people’s activity and wellbeing generally and during the pandemic when opportunities for young people have been so limited. These reports join the Active Lives Adult reports published by Sport England in October which shows the impact of the pandemic on adults’ activity patterns from mid-March to mid-May 2020 during the initial period of restrictions.
