The Economic and Social Data Service:

Investigating and locating policy studies relating to children and

health

Dr. Anat Vernitski, UK Data Archive ALISS, London, 3 August 2010

ESDS overview

• national data archiving, dissemination and support service

• jointly supported by: – Economic and Social Research Council – Joint Information Systems Committee

• partners:– UK Data Archive, Essex – Manchester Information and Associated

Services (MIMAS), Manchester– Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and

Survey Research (CCSR), Manchester – Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Essex

ESDS overview

UK Data Archive

• ESDS partner

• holds thousands of data collections for social

• science research and teaching, quantitative and qualitative

• internationally acknowledged experts in the areas of acquiring, curating and providing access to data.

• designated Place of Deposit for The National Archives

UK Data Archive

Kinds of data ESDS provides access to

• quantitative – micro data– macro data– data formats include SPSS, Stata and tab delimited

formats

• qualitative – data include in-depth interviews, diaries,

anthropological field notes and the complete answers to survey questions

– data formats include Excel, Word and RTF

• multimedia

• non-digital material

Finding data at ESDS

• specialist data services– ESDS Government– ESDS International– ESDS Longitudinal – ESDS Qualidata

• also access to– History Data Service– UK Census– Rural Economy and Land Use– Secure Data Service

Searching the ESDS catalogue

Finding health data at ESDS

• search by major subject category ‘health’ (studies where main focus is health)

• search by one or more sub-categories:– Accidents and injuries– Childbearing, family planning and abortion– Drug abuse, alcohol and smoking– General– Health services and medical care– Mental health– Nutrition– Physical fitness and exercise– Specific diseases and medical conditions

Finding health data at ESDS

• keyword search will find individual questions within a larger survey (e.g. ‘exercise’)– Keyword search uses he Humanities and Social

Sciences Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET), developed in-house at the UK Data Archive

• documentation online

Finding child welfare data at ESDS

• search by major subject category which is relevant to child welfare

• relevant subject categories include– Health: Childbearing, family planning and abortion– Education: contains a number of sub-categories– Social stratification and groupings: Child

development and child rearing

ESDS Government health data

• resources for government quantitative data– good quality data– continuous data– hierarchical data

• Health Survey for England/Wales/Scotland– this is the 3rd most popular ESDS Government data

resource, as shown by user survey

• General Lifestyle Survey

• National Food Survey

Quantitative child welfare data: longitudinal non government

– British Birth Cohort studies:• National Child Development Survey (NCDS)• British Cohort Study 1970 (BCS70)• Millennium Cohort Study (MCS)

– Families and Children Study (FACS)

– Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)

British Birth Cohort Studies

• impact of childhood conditions on later life and understanding children and families in the UK

• National Child Development Study follows a cohort born in a single week in 1958 - data collected at birth & ages 7, 11, 16, 23, 33, 42 (7 Up TV series)

British Birth Cohort Studies

• 1970 British Cohort Study follows a cohort born in a single week in 1970 - data collected around birth & ages 5, 10, 16, 26, 29 and most recently at age 34

• Millennium Cohort Study focuses on children born in 2000/ 2001 - first sweep at 9 months, second sweep at 3 years

• wide range of social, economic, health, medical and psychological issues

Quantitative data: cross-national

• SN 5307: Young Lives: an International Study of Childhood Poverty: Rounds 1 and 2, 2002-2006

• supported by ESDS International: http://www.esds.ac.uk/international/

ESDS International

ESDS Qualidata online

searches selected interview transcriptsSearch for child and health

Transcript retrieved from 1960s Mothers and Daughters study

Accessing data

download is to the user’s own computer

• you first need to register using UK Federation (own institution’s username and password)

• you agree to an End User Licence

• you specify a project for which you’d like to use data

• you download data selecting your desired format (SPSS, STATA, ASCII, RTF etc)

• you get an idea of file size

NESSTAR

• Nesstar is the online data exploration system used to provide access to a wide variety of datasets held by ESDS.

• all visitors to the ESDS Nesstar Catalogue can browse study metadata, variable frequencies and use the simple and advanced search options.

• registered users can also create simple online cross-tabulations, produce graphs, and download subsets of variables in a variety of formats.

• http://nesstar.esds.ac.uk/webview/index.jsp

Nesstar frequency, BCS

Birthweight

Nesstar table, BCS

Birthweight by father’s social class

Nesstar graph, BCS

Health learning and teaching resources guide

• thematic guide to health data: http://www.esds.ac.uk/themes/health/introduction.asp

• video guides: searching, downloading data

• case studies: for example, using the Health Survey for England

Health learning and teaching resources guide

• guides to using cross-national data for research into child mortality

• theme pages also include pointers to resources held at ESDS, such as useful datasets in the collection, and links to resources held elsewhere.

Thematic guide to health data

Other resources available through the UK Data Archive

• Survey Question Bank• http://www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/about/intr

oduction.asp

• History Data Service• http://hds.essex.ac.uk/

ESDS contact

help@esds.ac.uk