Most of the quotations from individuals (in double speechmarks) in the book come from data provided by people aged 19, 31, 50, 62 and 74 in 2020. They participate in five different birth cohort studies, which track people born in a certain year through their lives. The studies are the 2000 Millennium Cohort Study, the 1989– 90 Next Steps Study, the 1970 Birth Cohort Study, the 1958 Birth Cohort Study, and the 1946 National Survey of Health and Development.

All participants in these studies were asked to complete extra surveys during the pandemic. In May 2020 and February/ March 2021, respondents were asked to provide written answers online in their own words to an open-ended question about their pandemic experiences (see Chapter 1). In May 2020, this question was answered by 12,738 people across Britain – 57% of the people who answered the whole COVID-19 survey (and 21% of the total in the cohort studies). In February/March 2021, the open-ended question was answered by 12,168 people – 43% of those who answered the COVID-19 survey (and 31% of the total in the cohort studies). Thus, the responses are likely to overrepresent people who were able to respond online, and for whom the impact of COVID-19 was salient. There were higher response rates from female and older participants.

I did not draw a sample of the total 24,000 responses to analyse, but instead searched all responses using terms related to housing issues, such as ‘home’, ‘room’ and ‘landlord’. This approach obviously oversamples respondents for whom housing was a salient issue, but it is acceptable when combined with data to show how widespread different housing situations and concerns were in the period.

In May 2020, the average answer had 113 words. The commonest substantive words used by respondents were ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘time’ and ‘home’, except for those aged 74, whose most frequent words were ‘family’, ‘time’ and ‘life’ and ‘friends’.