A wide range of resources are available to support data analysis.
Understanding Society collects information from adults, young people, children and households using different questionnaires across multiple waves of data collection. To help users work with this large complex longitudinal dataset, the data are organised into a series of datasets and data files that follow a consistent structure and naming convention.
Variables and data files use a common root name, with a wave prefix indicating when the data were collected. For example, information collected in the household questionnaire is stored in the data file hhresp. Information on housing tenure collected at Wave 2 is stored in variable b_tenure within the data file b_hhresp. Further information about variable naming convention is available in the user guide.
To make it easy to find and access our large collection of data, we provide a full list of datasets available, information on how to access the datasets, and details of when the datasets will be released. The List of data files and their descriptions for the main survey is available in the user guide.
Information about the main survey and additional datasets are explained in their specific user guides.
To help data users manage and analyse these data a number of resources are available:
- The Code creator: Create your own Stata and R code to extract data from the main Understanding Society dataset (SN 6614, End User Licence).
- Data management syntax files
- User deposited syntax
- Variable naming convention
- Training Self-paced and in-person training for data management is provided. Regular training workshops are held each year to teach users about using weights, panel data methods, using children and youth data and online guidance is provided via Moodle courses to create bespoke weights, mixed-modes analysis guidance
- User Support: Contact us at the User Support Forum or by email. We respond within 48 hours for simple issues, 7 working days for more complex issues.
- Teaching datasets: Help is provided for lecturers to use Understanding Society data for their quantitative methods courses.