Understanding Society has a wealth of information for data users of all levels
It has a highly comprehensive online source of information regarding its variables, methodology, survey design and implementation. It is also an up-to-date source of training courses, data releases and other relevant news regarding longitudinal research.
It’s not a stupid question…
We are always pleased to hear from data users. You can contact us for help with using the data and for suggestions for improving the data.
Useful documentation links
As an introduction to the Understanding Society main study data and documentation we particularly recommend watching our ‘getting started’ videos and our pathway for new users page which explores the data and highlights the ways in which you can use the online resources to help you start using the data.
Videos
See our Exploring Understanding Society and Data Structure on our YouTube channel.
Visit our frequently asked questions page for more information.
Index Terms cover all the thematic areas in the Study and can be used to identify the variables most relevant to your research interests and to find other variables with related data throughout the dataset.
The topic pages provide an overview of each of the study’s thematic areas including information collected, the questions asked and links to related resources such as papers, webinars, blogs and news.
A list of Stata commands for basic data management and analysis tasks can be found on the syntax web page.
To help researchers get started with their research the Code creator extracts data from the Main Study and produces a simple flat data file. Select the variables needed from the Variable Search, ‘save’ the variables and ‘build’ the code. It provides you with ready-to-use Stata syntax to run on the downloaded data.
