Families in Tower Hamlets, 2020

The Families in Tower Hamlets project included a repeat online survey of households with children under five. The first wave of the repeat online survey ran from mid-July to end November 2020. The 126 item survey was drawn from previous sources: i) a parallel ‘Born in Bradford’ survey of job, housing and food insecurity, children’s home learning, health and care service access, and mental health, and ii) the 'Gender (In)equality in Times of COVID-19' survey run by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (INLPR) using validated instruments to examine work-family conflict and parental coping strategies, and iii) items from a national longitudinal household panel study called Understanding Society. The second wave of the repeat online survey ran from February-to May 2021. As with wave 1, the 126 items in the wave 2 survey were drawn from previous sources: i) a parallel ‘Born in Bradford’ survey of job, housing and food insecurity, children’s home learning, health and care service access, and mental health, and ii) the 'Gender (In)equality in Times of COVID-19' survey run by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (INLPR) using validated instruments to examine work-family conflict and parental coping strategies, and iii) items from a national longitudinal household panel study called Understanding Society. To obtain a free account please register with the UKDA.

Adverse direct and indirect impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic will disproportionately fall on individuals and families from poorer backgrounds, those in public facing jobs and living in higher density housing. Tower Hamlets, the site of this study, with its pre-existing stark income and health inequalities is already a high-risk inner city area, placed in one of the richest global cities. This project will focus on the impacts of the lockdown, and its aftermath for the borough's young children, who are likely to experience new health and educational inequalities as a result of the unprecedented restrictions on mobility associated with slowing the spread of COVID-19 introduced on 23 March 2020. Tower Hamlets has a highly diverse population profile, with residents from a wide range of ethnicities and social and economic backgrounds, which offers an opportunity to identify how families deploy their interpersonal, economic and social resources to manage risks associated with living in lockdown and in recovery from lockdown. In close partnership with the borough Public Health and children's services team, we will run a repeat survey of 2000 couple and single parent families with children aged 0-4, and pregnant women; a longitudinal qualitative panel with approximately 60 household members including fathers and wider kin; and examine changing family support services, and emergent community resources such as mutual aid and peer networks. We are interested in families' cultural and inter-personal assets as well as their vulnerabilities: what new forms of managing family and community life have emerged and how are these novel methods helping young children? We will include two groups defined as vulnerable; pregnant women and shielded children. The survey tools chosen are those being run by the concurrent Born in Bradford (BiB) cohort study and by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research offering robust comparisons. Findings will help guide the borough's deployment of scarce resources in the recovery phase of the pandemic and will have relevance to all inner-city areas.