University College London: Researching family life through a pandemic

The Challenge

When COVID-19 hit, social researchers studying young people and families faced a problem with no precedent. The lives they wanted to understand were changing in real time. Schools closed, generations shared smaller spaces, work and education collapsed into the home. The methods they normally relied on couldn't keep up. Recruiting in schools and youth clubs was off the table. Sitting with a family at their kitchen table was off the table. And the topic was time-sensitive: families' pandemic responses needed to be captured as they happened, not reconstructed afterwards.

Covid-19 has heightened many existing challenges faced by youth globally, and we as social researchers have had to adapt our research methods during the pandemic.

For Dr Himera Iqbal, an Associate Professor at UCL and a social and cultural psychologist studying young people, children and families, that adaptation had to be quick, ethical, and rigorous enough for academic publication. It also had to work across multiple generations within a single household, and ideally across multiple countries at once, to build the kind of comparative evidence base policymakers would actually use.

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The Approach

The Facts project, Families and Communities in the Time of COVID-19, launched in mid-May 2020, initially without funding. A multi-disciplinary UCL team of social psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists set out to capture how living through the pandemic was reshaping family life, education, work and relationships, and why different households were responding to public health rules in such different ways.

Digital ethnography over months, not weeks. UCL used Indeemo's platform to capture real-life observations in participants' own homes, in the moment, across photo, video, open text and mobile screen recording. The longitudinal frame was deliberate: knowledge, trust and proof all increase with time.

Multi-generational sampling. 38 families, 72 participants in total. Thirteen young people aged 12 and over, seven grandparents, with intergenerational dynamics inside each household. The team drew comparisons not just between households but within them, looking at how gender, generation and access to resources shaped pandemic responses.

An international comparative frame. 10 country partners ran parallel studies with the same research aims, creating a comparative evidence base across very different national contexts and government responses.

Flash tasks for live events. When the Black Lives Matter protests occurred in the UK, the team set a task within hours asking young people what they thought about protest during a pandemic. The platform let the research move as fast as the events it was studying.

Pseudonyms throughout. Every participant used a pseudonym, like Daffodil and Elderberry, to maintain privacy across years of intimate household data.

A diverse, representative sample. Initial recruitment skewed middle-class. The team partnered with poverty charities and other networks, secured funding for grocery and phone top-up vouchers as incentives, and offered tablets to families without devices.

Digital ethnography really helps us to understand how people behave in context and in the moment in their own home environments. You're able to really remotely walk in participants' shoes.

The eight-week study window of a typical commercial diary study didn't apply here. The Facts project ran longitudinally over many months, long enough to see the same family across multiple lockdowns, multiple government policy shifts, and multiple stages of children's lives.

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The Results

By six months in, the project had set 37 distinct diary tasks, captured rich multi-modal data across 38 households, and built one of the most detailed living records of UK family life through the pandemic that any academic team had assembled.

A genuinely diverse sample, against the odds. The team's initial survey skewed middle-class, but partnerships with poverty charities and other networks, combined with tablet provision and voucher incentives, produced a sample where roughly 39% of participants came from black and minority ethnic backgrounds and the team had families across the income spectrum.

Inter- and intra-household comparison at scale. With three generations represented and pseudonymised participants speaking for themselves, the project could see how the same household experienced the pandemic through very different lenses. Examples surfaced through the data, like Elderberry's son sharing a photo of doing his school work on his bed because his home didn't have space for a desk, that anchored abstract findings in concrete lives.

Real-time responsiveness. Flash tasks let the team capture reactions to events as they happened, from BLM protests to lockdown rule changes. Research moving at the speed of the news cycle, not the speed of typical academic fieldwork.

Emotional depth through video. Dr Iqbal noted that video tasks proved especially powerful for capturing emotions and feelings, with participants opening up in ways that text or interview alone wouldn't have surfaced.

A direct line back to participants. The team committed to six-month feedback reports, regular video updates, and a clear pathway from findings to policymakers, making the research feel reciprocal for participants rather than extractive.

Methodology robust enough for academic publication. The Facts project went through rigorous university ethics review, used UCL's own secure infrastructure for non-platform data, and built protocols for safeguarding young participants. All the things that turn a fast pandemic-era pivot into research that can be cited, replicated and built on.

The good thing about this app is that it allows for a responsive and reflexive approach. The videos have been really, really useful, particularly when we ask tasks about emotions or feelings, participants have just really opened up about these.