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Active Lives Survey 2023-24 – full technical report

Adults | November 2023-2024

Survey background

Sport England is an increasingly insight-led organisation that is tasked with the behavioural challenge of getting more people active.

To create the right conditions to increase participation, to decide who they invest in, and to understand how sport can deliver wider objectives they need both a broad and deep understanding of sports participation.

Through their commitment to the measurement of sports participation over the past decade, Sport England have largely unparalleled participation data, both internationally and amongst other sporting and cultural organisations in the UK.

Through the Active Lives Adult Survey, Sport England have sought to strengthen this commitment whilst ensuring the data reflects the best available methods of data collection and aligns with their strategy (Uniting the Movement).

To achieve this, Sport England piloted new methods, consulted widely with the sector, and sought advice from independent experts such as the Office of National Statistics and the Institute for Social and Economic Research in the development process.

Summary of the survey

In this section, we provide a brief overview of the key points in relation to the survey design, fieldwork and data. Full details are provided in the rest of the report.

The ninth year of the Active Lives Adult Survey was conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Sport England, which commissioned the survey with additional funding from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).

  • Design

    The Active Lives adult survey is a ‘push-to-web’ survey involving four postal mail outs designed to encourage participants to complete the survey online.

    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 16th November 2023 and 15th 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.

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  • Questionnaire

    The questions within the Active Lives survey questionnaire explore the sport and physical activities that people take part in, how often they participate, for how long and where they take part.

    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.

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  • Sampling

    The sample is selected from the Postcode Address File using random probability sampling and one letter is sent to each address, inviting up to two adults from the household to take part.

    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.

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  • Weighting

    Weighting is calculated that makes the achieved sample match the population as closely as possible with the aim of reducing bias in the survey estimates.

    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.

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Signposting for the technical report

This report is organised broadly in the order in which survey processes were completed: questionnaire design, sampling, fieldwork, response, weighting, data management.

Terminology used in the report

Those who respond to the survey are referred to as respondents. The reason for not using the conventional term participants is that, in the context of sports participation, participant has a different meaning.

When describing the development of the questionnaire using focus groups and cognitive interviews, those who took part are referred to as participants, since respondent is not a suitable term to use in the context of qualitative methods.
 

This work was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the international quality standard for Market Research, ISO 20252, and with the Ipsos Terms and Conditions. © Sport England 2025

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