Our data comprises 186 semi-structured interview transcripts from 2 phases of fieldwork. The first phase of the research comprised 123 individual (88) and joint (35) face-to-face interviews with 90 Universal Credit joint claimants in 53 households, in four areas in England and Scotland, between June 2018 and January 2019. Follow-up interviews were conducted by telephone (due to COVID-19 restrictions) with 63 participants in 39 households between August and October 2020.In the context of radical welfare reforms being rolled out under the umbrella of Universal Credit (UC), requiring both partners in a couple with dependent children to look for and enter work, even when one partner is already in employment, and merging a family's entire welfare entitlement - including money for living costs, children and housing - into a single monthly payment, as UC does, is unprecedented. The government claims that extending work activation and conditionality in couple families will reduce welfare dependency and help the partners achieve a better work-life balance. Decreasing the number and frequency of welfare payments reflects the world of work and will allow families to budget better, they say. Academics, civil society and advocacy organisations are less sanguine. Absorption of benefits intended for children into a single award, they point out, reverses a long established principle in UK social security that child-contingent benefits should be paid to the caring parent (Lister, 2010). Research also attests to the effectiveness of paying child benefits to the main carer in enabling state transfers to be redistributed within households (Lundberg et al., 1997, Goode et al., 1998). Other studies suggests that the labelling, separation and differential timing of benefits often assists rather than impairs money management, helping recipients to understand what the money is awarded for, facilitating budgeting and influencing on what or whom the monies are spent (Kempson, 1996, Goode et al., 1999). If the single monthly payment is made into an account to which one partner has no or limited access, inequalities of power within some couple relationships could also reduce the other partner's access to an independent income (Bennett and Sung, 2013). Reduced financial independence could, in turn, contribute towards relationship instability (Griffiths 2017), countering the government's aim of supporting couple relationships and stable families. Academics and civil society organisations have sought to raise awareness of UC's potential 'purse to wallet' income transfers and the possible adverse effects on women's financial independence, couples' management of their household finances, women's and children's poverty and couple's relationships (CPAG, 2010, Women's Budget Group, 2011). However, no-one knows how affected couples will respond to UC; these policies are untried and untested anywhere in the world. By conducting the first empirical study to explore UC's wider effects on couple families, findings from this research will help fill this important gap in the evidence base. This three year, longitudinal, qualitative research study will investigate how these aspects of welfare reform are being responded to and affecting work-care patterns, intra-household financial management and distribution, and gender roles and relations. To capture differential effects on men and women and changes in couples' behaviour over time, and to ensure the inclusion new UC claimants, as well as benefit and tax credit claimants migrated onto UC, separate and joint, face-to-face interviews with both members of the couple will be conducted in 4 UK areas in England and Scotland over two phases of research. Findings and policy implications will be written up in relation to the design and implementation of Universal Credit, the reform of working age benefits, gender equality and work-family reconciliation policies, and widely disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences.

We conducted two waves of in-depth interviews approximately two years apart. The first phase of the research comprised 123 individual and joint face-to-face interviews with 90 Universal Credit joint claimants in 53 households, in four areas in England and Scotland, between June 2018 and January 2019. Participants were recruited using outreach, door to door, snowballing and social media techniques. Follow-up interviews were conducted by telephone (due to COVID-19 restrictions) with 63 participants in 39 households between August and October 2020. Our first report from the study "Unchartered Territory: Universal Credit, Couples and Money" was based on analysis of the first wave of interviews. Our second report "Couples navigating work, care and Universal Credit" was based on our longitudinal analysis of both waves. For the second report, we categorised the sample of 39 households according to their earner status when they were couples at, or in a few cases before, phase 1. This gave us three main groups: two-earner couples (10 households), one-earner couples (13 households) and no-earner couples (16 households). Drawing on longitudinal data from 157 interview transcripts, we tracked employment transitions over time, and the reasons for this. For each couple, we produced a detailed case summary which examined continuity and change in employment status, gender roles and couple relationships.