Introduction: Summary of the survey

The survey is fully ‘device-agnostic’ and so can be completed on mobile devices or a desktop PC/laptop.

The first two mail-outs are letters containing information about how to access the survey online and a passcode for accessing the survey.

At the third mailing, a paper self-completion questionnaire is sent out to maximise response. A final letter reminder is sent to half of the sample at the fourth mailing which includes a reminder of how to access the online questionnaire (it does not include a paper questionnaire).

The data were collected between 16 November 2023 and 15 November 2024 using an online questionnaire and a paper self-completion questionnaire.

Up to two adults (aged 16+) from each selected household were invited to complete the survey, either online or using the paper questionnaires. Valid responses were received from 171,926 people in total.

Questions on attendance at live sporting events, membership of clubs, levels of volunteering, motivations, loneliness, readiness for physical activity and participation habits are also included.

Finally, the questionnaire also includes classification questions such as age, gender, socio-economic status, education level, household living arrangements, sexual identity and religion.

It should be noted that some of the questions were asked to half of the sample online.

This was to allow for different questions to be asked of different groups without increasing the length of the questionnaire.

Later in this report we show which questions were asked of each group.

If households do not respond to the initial invitation letter, up to three reminder letters are sent to help maximise response to the survey.

In total, initial invitation letters were sent to 657,383 addresses in England in order to generate survey responses between November 2023 – November 2024.

The weighting corrects for the disproportionate selection of addresses across local authorities (related to target samples for each local authority) and for the selection of adults within households, and then the sample is adjusted to control for seasonality (by month) and to match a combination of population estimates and national estimates from 2023 population estimates (region with local authority), 2023 Labour Force Survey (number of people in household) and 2023-24 Labour Force Survey (everything else).

Some questions are only asked within the online survey, and others are asked of a sub-sample of online respondents (respondents to the online survey are randomly assigned to two sub-groups).

Additional weights are created for questions within these sections.

For more information on the weighting strategy, see the Weighting section, later in this report.