This course has been developed by Associate Professor Rory Coulter, Lecturer in Geography at UCL and Understanding Society Topic Champion for Housing. The course shows users how to extract a multifunctional longitudinal ‘data spine’ from Understanding Society datafiles, which can be adapted and enriched to help answer a wide range of longitudinal research questions.
Who is the course suitable for?
This course is for users who would like to learn how to make more efficient use of the extremely rich but complex Understanding Society datasets. Users should have some knowledge of running statistical analysis using R, completed the Introduction to Understanding Society course, and have at least a little experience of working with Understanding Society data.
What will I learn?
In this course users will initially learn how to assemble a multifunctional longitudinal ‘data spine’, which records basic information about each person who has ever been part of the survey, as well as their interview history. Building a ‘data spine’ is a very efficient way to work with Understanding Society, as the spine can easily be enriched with additional variables and/or filtered to answer a very wide range of research questions.
Users will then learn how to enrich their data spine with information from individual and household interviews, as well as relationships between household members. Along the way users will be given handy tips about data cleaning, variable recoding and will learn how to build some basic data visualisations using R’s powerful ggplot2 package.
In the final exercise users will explore the data to answer the research question: to what extent do younger adults’ homeownership transitions vary with the socio-economic status of their parents? Some basic methods for running longitudinal analysis of Understanding Society are introduced, and users will also be given a brief practical introduction to using survey weights.
The course consists of four exercises:
- Building an Understanding Society data spine
- Working with data about individuals
- Household and relationships
- Data exploration
Enrol on Working more efficiently with Understanding Society
To see details on how to sign-up to Moodle and other training courses available, visit the Understanding Society Training hub.
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