Introduction to Understanding Society using R - Part 1 & 2 (ONLINE)

This course is aimed at new users of Understanding Society, as well as those who have so far only made use of simpler aspects of the dataset. It aims to guide the user through the complexities of using these data for cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, and ensure that they can make effective use of Understanding Society for their own research projects.

Part 1 is a series of lectures over a 3,5 hour period, during which participants will learn about Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study, specifically they will learn about:

• Design of the survey and research possibilities
• Who is interviewed, and when, how often?
• What information is collected, and from whom?
• How is the information collected? What questions are asked?
• How the information collected is stored (file structure and content)?
• What other information can be linked with the survey data, and how?
• How to access these datasets

Understanding Society is a longitudinal study that collects comprehensive information about the lives of individuals, and their households, at one-year intervals enabling inter-disciplinary research across multiple topics. Participants will also learn how to effectively and efficiently search and find the variables/questions that they are interested in analysing.

Part 2 is a 1.5-day hands-on workshop that builds on the lessons learnt in Part 1, participants will learn how to combine the survey information provided in multiple hierarchical datafiles into a single datafile that can be used for specific types of analysis.

Participants will be expected to work through a series of worked examples, each highlighting a separate data management task, at their own pace. Instructors with expertise in the survey, data management and the statistical software package will be present throughout the course to answer questions about the survey, the data and the software.

During the hands-on sessions, each worked out example is introduced by the course instructor with a short lecture about what the participant is expected to learn from completing the example. List of examples to be worked on in the hands-on sessions are:

• Understanding Society online documentation in a nutshell
• Matching data from respondents at two waves into wide forma
• Matching data from respondents at two or more waves into long format
• Distributing household-level information to respondents
• Aggregating individual-level information to the household
• Working with weights and complex survey design
• How to match information of two household members
• Using “egoalt” file

The worked-out examples will be provided in R.

Participants will be provided handouts of the presentation slides, worksheets and syntax files to accompany the worked-out exercises.

Participants should have access to a computer or laptop with the following software installed:

• R version 3.6.1 or above / R studio version 1.1.4 or higher

• Participants are expected to have some basic understanding of quantitative data.
• Participants are expected to have some basic understanding of R

Event Venue

Online