- Welcome
- Important notice
- About the author
- About this site
- Site guide + Search box
- Dedications
- Acknowledgments
- My personal pantheon (of the great and the good in survey research)
- Recent and planned activities
- Textbooks for Research Methods and Data Analysis
- 1: Survey Analysis Workshop (SPSS)
- 1a: Statistical concepts and methods
- 1b: Teaching with Survey Data
- 1c: Developing research projects using survey data
- 1d: Workshop and presentations for ASSESS (SPSS users in Europe)
- 2: Survey Research Practice
- 2a: Survey Research Methodology, Practice and Training
- 2b: Major survey series
- 3: Subjective Social Indicators (Quality of Life)
- 4: Survey Unit, Social Science Research Council (UK)
- 5a: Polytechnic of North London (1976-1992)
- 5b: Survey Research Unit (1978-1992)
- Village life in Normandy
- Contact
- Origins of the British Crime Survey
- British Crime Survey
Teaching with Survey Data
[New page 28 August 2014: last updated 4 November 2017]
See also:
Developing research projects using survey data
Jen Buckley and Sarah King-Hele
Using survey data guide (August 2015, pdf, 45pp)
MacInnes 2017
(Commentary on textbook)
Notes on first encounter with the ONS unrestricted teaching data set
(Revised notes on Unrestricted Teaching Data Set (SPSS) for ONS Well-being 2011, pdf, 55pp. 3.15 kb)
Babbie, Wagner and Zainol 2019
(Comments on new textbook)
In the UK there are two important new developments in teaching Quantitative Methods (QM) to undergraduates in the social sciences.
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has launched the Quantitative Methods Initiative which "aims to improve capacity in quantitative social science and make best possible use of the UK's world-class data infrastructure. It covers the entire educational life course from school projects to postdoctoral research and all social science disciplines. It includes both research and teaching and learning."
The Nuffield Foundation is adding support in the form of £19.5 million funding for 15 Q-Step Centres which "each have their own plans for developing and delivering new forms of quantitative skills training that will attract students and provide a deeper and more secure grasp of the quantitative skills needed to evaluate evidence and analyse data within their discipline." The first prospectus is now available: Shaping society: Quantitative social science for the 21st century Undergraduate Q-Step prospectus
I appreciate that QM is much wider than survey research, but I have always found that surveys are a good starting point for students in sociology, social policy and political science, especially if they have little or no experience of, or interest in, numeracy or statistics. Having acquired basic skills in data handling and using tabulation and charts, and been introduced to the idea of significance testing, they are well placed to move to more advanced areas involving inferential statistics. modelling and sampling theory.
Data from regular government surveys are now openly available under Open Access Licence. UK Data Services (UKDS) based at Essex University is currently developing a series of unrestricted access data sets available for teaching without registration. Elsewhere data sets are also being developed, specially prepared for teaching. (See also pages British Social Attitudes and 3.2 Three (or more) variables)
I have been exploring the SPSS versions of some of these data sets from the standpoint of good practice with respect to their structure, design and ease of use, and have written detailed introductions and commentaries for them. However my commentaries are also underpinned by the principles of good pedagogy and are written with beginning researchers and students in mind. To this end I have modified the files and given detailed explanations of what has been done and why. Revised versions of the files have then been returned to their respective distributors.
Everything will be step-by-step with full colour screenshots at each step. It only has to be done once and it will be helpful to teachers, researchers and students to see how an experienced (social) survey researcher and SPSS user thinks and works, This will help them not only to work on these and other data sets, but also to absorb something of the logic and process of survey analysis whilst posing and answering substantive social research questions rather than grappling with sampling theory, weighting and complex statistical formulae. In passing they should also appreciate that SPSS syntax is simpler and easier to use than the GUI for basic tasks: learning syntax will help them to think about what they are doing, leave an audit trail for themselves and others working on the same data, and help to understand software such as Stata and R
Some of these data sets and my commentaries on them are listed on SPSS files and documentation used for tutorials and exercises but I have recently been looking at two data sets specifically created for teaching, based on real surveys, one by government, the other for social research. Information, documentation and data are available from UKDS
The surveys and commentaries available so far are:
British Social Attitudes [New page 22 June 2016] with links to:
Exploring British Social Attitudes [New page 14 March 2016]
British Social Attitudes 1983 to 2014 (Cumulative SPSS file) [New page 22 June 2016]
SN 7146: ONS Opinions Survey, Well‐Being Module, April 2011 [New page 2 May 2015]
SN 28: Relative Deprivation and Social Justice 1962-63 [New page 2 May 2015]
MacInnes (2017) is a new page which contains commentaries on video tutorials and SPSS syntax in Introduction to Secondary Data Analysis with IBM-SPSS Statistics, a new text book by Prof John MacInnes which uses data from major survey series including the European Social Survey, the NORC General Social Survey and others.
Another survey of interest (not yet used for tutorials) is the very first Multi-purpose Social Survey (SN 680)
conducted in the UK by the SSRC Survey Unit in 1975. (See: Commentary on Multi-purpose 1975)
See also my contributions to the 2014 meeting of ASSESS (SPSS users in Europe) at the University of York on 31st October. All files are in pdf format and contain hyperlinks (tested and working) to other resources:
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: working with alien SPSS files [new page on this site]
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: working with alien SPSS files [pdf file with hyperlinks]
(Introduction to, and critical commentary on, SPSS files from major surveys distributed by the UK Data Service and others, with particular emphasis on their suitability and ease of use for teaching and secondary research.)
The Beginners’ [Clods’ ] Guide to Survey Analysis Using SPSS [new page on this site]
The Beginners’ [Clods’ ] Guide to Survey Analysis Using SPSS [pdf file with hyperlinks]
ASSESS 2014_Links to files (some overlap with above, but covers both sessions)
See also:
Developing research projects using survey data
Jen Buckley and Sarah King-Hele
Using survey data guide (August 2015, pdf, 45pp)
MacInnes 2017
(Commentary on textbook)
Notes on first encounter with the ONS unrestricted teaching data set
(Revised notes on Unrestricted Teaching Data Set (SPSS) for ONS Well-being 2011, pdf, 55pp. 3.15 kb)
Babbie, Wagner and Zainol 2019
(Comments on new textbook)
In the UK there are two important new developments in teaching Quantitative Methods (QM) to undergraduates in the social sciences.
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has launched the Quantitative Methods Initiative which "aims to improve capacity in quantitative social science and make best possible use of the UK's world-class data infrastructure. It covers the entire educational life course from school projects to postdoctoral research and all social science disciplines. It includes both research and teaching and learning."
The Nuffield Foundation is adding support in the form of £19.5 million funding for 15 Q-Step Centres which "each have their own plans for developing and delivering new forms of quantitative skills training that will attract students and provide a deeper and more secure grasp of the quantitative skills needed to evaluate evidence and analyse data within their discipline." The first prospectus is now available: Shaping society: Quantitative social science for the 21st century Undergraduate Q-Step prospectus
I appreciate that QM is much wider than survey research, but I have always found that surveys are a good starting point for students in sociology, social policy and political science, especially if they have little or no experience of, or interest in, numeracy or statistics. Having acquired basic skills in data handling and using tabulation and charts, and been introduced to the idea of significance testing, they are well placed to move to more advanced areas involving inferential statistics. modelling and sampling theory.
Data from regular government surveys are now openly available under Open Access Licence. UK Data Services (UKDS) based at Essex University is currently developing a series of unrestricted access data sets available for teaching without registration. Elsewhere data sets are also being developed, specially prepared for teaching. (See also pages British Social Attitudes and 3.2 Three (or more) variables)
I have been exploring the SPSS versions of some of these data sets from the standpoint of good practice with respect to their structure, design and ease of use, and have written detailed introductions and commentaries for them. However my commentaries are also underpinned by the principles of good pedagogy and are written with beginning researchers and students in mind. To this end I have modified the files and given detailed explanations of what has been done and why. Revised versions of the files have then been returned to their respective distributors.
Everything will be step-by-step with full colour screenshots at each step. It only has to be done once and it will be helpful to teachers, researchers and students to see how an experienced (social) survey researcher and SPSS user thinks and works, This will help them not only to work on these and other data sets, but also to absorb something of the logic and process of survey analysis whilst posing and answering substantive social research questions rather than grappling with sampling theory, weighting and complex statistical formulae. In passing they should also appreciate that SPSS syntax is simpler and easier to use than the GUI for basic tasks: learning syntax will help them to think about what they are doing, leave an audit trail for themselves and others working on the same data, and help to understand software such as Stata and R
Some of these data sets and my commentaries on them are listed on SPSS files and documentation used for tutorials and exercises but I have recently been looking at two data sets specifically created for teaching, based on real surveys, one by government, the other for social research. Information, documentation and data are available from UKDS
The surveys and commentaries available so far are:
British Social Attitudes [New page 22 June 2016] with links to:
Exploring British Social Attitudes [New page 14 March 2016]
British Social Attitudes 1983 to 2014 (Cumulative SPSS file) [New page 22 June 2016]
SN 7146: ONS Opinions Survey, Well‐Being Module, April 2011 [New page 2 May 2015]
SN 28: Relative Deprivation and Social Justice 1962-63 [New page 2 May 2015]
MacInnes (2017) is a new page which contains commentaries on video tutorials and SPSS syntax in Introduction to Secondary Data Analysis with IBM-SPSS Statistics, a new text book by Prof John MacInnes which uses data from major survey series including the European Social Survey, the NORC General Social Survey and others.
Another survey of interest (not yet used for tutorials) is the very first Multi-purpose Social Survey (SN 680)
conducted in the UK by the SSRC Survey Unit in 1975. (See: Commentary on Multi-purpose 1975)
See also my contributions to the 2014 meeting of ASSESS (SPSS users in Europe) at the University of York on 31st October. All files are in pdf format and contain hyperlinks (tested and working) to other resources:
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: working with alien SPSS files [new page on this site]
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: working with alien SPSS files [pdf file with hyperlinks]
(Introduction to, and critical commentary on, SPSS files from major surveys distributed by the UK Data Service and others, with particular emphasis on their suitability and ease of use for teaching and secondary research.)
The Beginners’ [Clods’ ] Guide to Survey Analysis Using SPSS [new page on this site]
The Beginners’ [Clods’ ] Guide to Survey Analysis Using SPSS [pdf file with hyperlinks]
ASSESS 2014_Links to files (some overlap with above, but covers both sessions)