Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This series of datasets which covers a range of research topics in the social sciences, was created to accompany the second edition of the book Exploring Data, and to illustrate statistical techniques. The data to accompany the first edition of this book is available at the UKDA under SN 2661.

The study comprises five datasets extracted from full datasets held at the UKDA. The number of variables in each dataset is restricted to reduce the complexity of the data. However, all cases in the original datasets are included in these teaching datasets.

The data within this study are compiled from:

• British Social Attitudes (BSA), 2004 (available at the UKDA under SN 5329)
• General Household Survey (GHS), 2005 (available at the UKDA under SN 5640)
• National Child Development Study (NCDS), 1958-2004 (various study numbers but available at the UKDA under GN 33004)
• World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI), (available at the UKDA under SN 4814)
• Youth Cohort Study (YCS), Cohort 11 (available at the UKDA under SN 5452)

Main Topics:

The series of datasets cover a range of research topics in the social sciences but with a focus on education, employment, health, social participation, attitudes to government and democracy and social mobility. Four of the datasets contain microdata with the individual as the unit of analysis, but the World Bank WDI dataset is rather different in that the unit of analysis is country.