Data sets and documents used for tutorials and exercises

Summary

All data sets can be accessed from data sets and documents.. Some facsimile questionnaires are included, but if not, links to extracts are provided in tutorials as and when necessary.

Pre-course survey of skills and interests (Block 1)

Students on the original Survey Analysis Workshop completed a short questionnaire at the beginning of the course.  The questionnaire included questions on previous experience of computing and statistics and a selection of questions replicated from the British Social Attitudes survey and asking for principal mode of travel to the campus, gender, age and height.  It was part of an exercise in which they had to copy data to a transfer sheet and then type the data into a computer file, prior to using SPSS.for processing and analysis.  Students with little or no previous experience of computing or statistics found this procedure very helpful in understanding where data come from and how they get into the computer.  There is a cumulative data set for all students over several waves and a related SPSS saved file.  These files form the basis for the first part of this course.  If you like you can complete the questionnaire yourself and add your own data.

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British Social Attitudes

The tutorials use the same data from the 1986 and 1989 waves of the British Social Attitudes survey series that was used on my original course.  Data sets and documentation from later surveys are available from the UK Data Archive and may be used in future tutorials, but writing, uploading and verifying them is daunting and exhausting.  The raw data are used to help you to learn how buld up your own files: you will not be using the entire set.  There are also SPSS saved files for both 1986 and 1989: these have the full original variable set, but no derived variables.  Getting SPSS to access files from websites can be extremely complicated, so you will need to copy some files to your own computer first, but it won't be necessary to keep everything once you have extracted what you need.

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Quality of Life in Britain

Some of the new tutorials use examples from the series of surveys conducted by Mark Abrams and myself at the SSRC Survey Unit between 1971 and 1975 (in collaboration with Angus Campbell, ISR, Michigan) to develop subjective social indicators to measure the quality of life..  They may be more than 35 years old, but they contain interesting questions and were designed to enable links to data from other sources (eg the Census).  For now the only file we shall be using is the SPSS saved file for the 1975 nation-wide survey.

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Playground to Politics

A 1981 study of values and attitudes from a Fifth Form survey (15 and 16-year olds) in a North London comprehensive school..  Demonstration of derived variables using RECODE, COUNT and COMPUTE

Other data sources

I hope eventually to use later waves of the British Social Attitudes survey, the European Social Survey
 and other major data sets in the public domain.