Parent Ping: Daily Parent Survey, 2020-2021

The Parent Ping research project began in July 2020 and ended in September 2021. The project aimed to document parental life, particular during the [Covid-19] pandemic. Participants were recruited via opportunity sampling or via their children's school. Participants downloaded a mobile phone app which asked them roughly three closed survey questions each day.

Question topics included: lockdown, home learning (due to school closures), attitudes to vaccination, family life, home-school relationships etc. Demographic data were also collected from each participant including: their age, their gender, the number of children they have, the gender of their children, whether their child has a special educational need and whether their child is eligible to receive free school meals. In the time the project has run, data were collected from roughly 1,200 questions and around 3,000 UK parents.

Parent Ping was created by Education Intelligence, a company that since 2017 has run a daily survey app for teachers in England called Teacher Tapp. When schools closed for the majority of pupils during the 2020 covid pandemic there was a specific need to understand how parents were coping with home educating their children. Education Intelligence were able to secure a small grant from Big Change to replicate the software used to create Teacher Tapp in order to survey parents. The app they built was call Parent Ping.

Key features of the app were:

• It asked questions every day (yes, even Christmas Day)
• Respondents were able to view aggregated results of the previous day’s questions
• Respondents were also given a daily read about an aspect of parenting.

Parent Ping was live for just over a year, pivotally collecting data during the second national lockdown in early 2021.

Data analysis

Users should note that the individual questions are all included together in the variable 'questiontext' and the answers are in the variable 'answertext'. In order to analyse questions separately, data will need to be filtered/subset using the 'questionid' and 'answerid' variables. The data file contains 2,412,976 lines, which means the tab-separated format cannot be viewed successfully in Excel. To obtain a free account please register with the UKDA.