Age 26 Survey – Views and values

To celebrate 50 years of BCS70, over the course of the year we’ll be highlighting interesting features of the study’s design, delving deeper into the questionnaires and pulling out descriptive statistics from the data.

The Age 26 Survey was the first adult survey of BCS70, and aimed to find out what you were doing in your mid-20s. Around 9,000 of you took part. We asked you questions about employment, relationships, children, physical and mental health, drinking and smoking. We also wanted to find out about your views on various topics, including gender equality, politics and marriage. We gave you a list of 17 statements such as “When both partners work full time, the man should take an equal share of domestic chores” and asked you to tell us whether you agreed or disagreed with them. We’d used the same questions five years before with another birth cohort 12 years older than you, the National Child Development Survey – whose members were 33 at the time – so we could compare answers. Many of the questions were repeated in later surveys, to see how your attitudes and values may have changed as you got older.

Find out more about the Age 26 Survey