ONS Survey.. anyone taking part?

[littlerose12345]

Just received an invitation to take part which we will as a household.

Is anyone doing this and received the gift vouchers? Are they Amazon?

Yes weve been doing it for a few weeks. £50 per person for the first week then £25 pp thereafter. You choose where you want the vouchers for and you can split the amounts. So far we have used vouchers at Sainsbury's, M&S and Amazon. Theres a wide range you can choose from.

Thank you

Can you specify the time they come and visit? Not a big issue since DH and I are both working from home still but trying to work out if I will be able to include the kids too.

ONS study invite? Anyone else doing this? www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4020632-ONS-study-invite-Anyone-else-doing-this
and there are numerous other threads if you search "ONS".

One you register you will get a phonecall from one of the survey staff who will arrange to come to your home. Make sure it’s on a day that suits you. If it doesn’t, it’s ok to ask for it to be changed to a different day. The day you start will be the day you stick to going forward so it really does matter that it’s a day you can regularly make. You can technically change it one week by a day either side, but they don’t really like you doing it, and we’ve been told that if it was more than a day out then we’d be better just missing that session.

We have completed our first 5 weeks and now onto the monthly visits. The survey staff members only get their list of people the day before (usually around 5pm in our experience) and they will then call to arrange the time for your tests the following day.

The initial appointment is longer as there are a lot more questions to answer. For 6 of us it was a bit over an hour. Subsequent appointments have only been about 15min all in. We have one study guy who has done 3 of our tests and he’s brilliant - really thorough and really well prepared. (Came with his own folding chair so he didn’t need to set foot inside our house) We had a different guy on 2 of the weeks who we were much less impressed with. He came into the house without asking, sat down, touched a bunch of stuff, didn’t listen when we answered questions so we had to repeat the answers sometimes 3 times over and didn’t even ask all the questions he was supposed to ask. We have decided that if we get a call from him again we’re going to request someone else. He didn’t make us feel safe and we didn’t feel like he was even doing the study properly because he wasn’t asking the full list of questions.

All 6 of our family are taking part - it’s worth the money! We haven’t spent any vouchers yet. Once you receive your voucher codes (about 10 days or so after the test in our experience) you have 3 months to activate them. When you activate them you need to choose which shop to get the vouchers allocated to. (There is a wide range to choose from) Once they are activated then it depends on the individual retailer how long the voucher lasts.

We are about to move house so will be spending all of the first 5 week’s vouchers in Curry’s - they’ll pay for a big chunk of the cost of our new fridge/freezer.

Thank you XFPW, that's really helpful!