A quick comparison of social and economic surveys in the UK

Having worked on both social and economic surveys in the UK I’ve been musing about the differences between the two for a while now. I am to write some more in-depth posts with some anecdotes in the future.

For now here is a brief comparison of the differences between social and economic surveys in the UK.

Topic	Social	Economic
Sampling frame	Postcode Address File	Inter-departmental Business Register
Maintainer	Royal Mail	Office for National Statistics
Unit	Household	Business enterprise
Proxy	Household or individual people	Business owners or employees
Typical topics asked	Employment, inflation, and migration	Gross domestic product (GDP), inflation
Primary legislation	Statistics and Registration Service Act (SRSA) 2007	Statistics of Trade Act 1947
Range	Living in private residential in the UK	Businesses with 5+ employees in the UK
Types of units	Anyone living in a private residential household	Businesses Local authorities Schools, colleges and universities Charities Churches Government departments
Breakdowns of interest	Demographics Occupations Geographic locations	Business size Economic activities Geographic locations
Improved or enriched frames	Postcode Address File Plus by added Ordnance Survey data	Longitudinal Business Database by ONS using longitudinal business micro-data
Classification schemes	Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)	Standard Industrial Classification (SIC)
Updating timings	Daily	Daily
Update to public	Daily	Four times a year
How is it made	Updated daily by Royal Mail staff adding, amending and removing residential addresses	Updated continuously with data from various sources such as VAT and PAYE records from HMRC, Companies House, and ONS business surveys
Limitations	Excludes people not living in private residential accommodation Can exclude or badly categorise people due to outdated SOCs	Excludes micro businesses of less than 10 employees Can exclude or badly categorise businesses due to outdated SICs