Accessing the MCS from the Economic and Social Data Service

Jack KneeshawMCS workshop 13 October 2009

ESDS Longitudinal

Economic and Social Data Service

• provides access and support for key economic and social data

• distributed service, bringing together centres of expertise in data creation, dissemination, preservation and use

• core archiving services plus four specialist data services

ESDS Longitudinal

Joint enterprise:

• UK Data Archive (UKDA)• UK Longitudinal Studies Centre (ULSC)

based at ISER

• supports a range of longitudinal data collections but seven ‘core’ collections in particular:

• National Child Development Study (NCDS)• 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) • Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) • British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) • English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA)• Longitudinal Study of Young people in England

(LSYPE)• Families and Children Study (FACS)

Data Deposit, Processing, Retrieval and Access

The data themselves

Ensuring confidentiality

• cohort members promised confidentiality

• datasets deposited with UKDA are fully anonymised

• datasets go through further process of checking at the UKDA

• users undertake not to identify individuals or wards sampled (but note that ‘special licence’ access possible)

Retrieval and access

• web access, via ESDS site, to data and metadata

• documentation (codebooks, questionnaires) freely available to any ESDS user (registered or unregistered)

• MCS1 data can be browsed and frequencies run by any user (registered or unregistered) using Nesstar

• full datasets are freely available for download for the majority of our registered users

• data supplied in a variety of formats– SPSS – Stata– tab-delimited text

Special licence access

• several ‘special licence’ (SL) datasets have recently been made available:

ward, OA, LSOA, hospital of birth

• strategy to provide access to datasets that are detailed, yet anonymised

• as these data pose a higher risk of disclosure, they have additional special conditions attached to them

• the SL requires the signature(s) of the researcher(s) and the institution with responsibility for the researcher; also needs the explicit permission of the data owner to release the data to the researcher(s)

Online access for registered users

Registered users can:

• download full datasets

• order data via online order system

• browse/analyse/download data in Nesstar

To register:

• login via UK Fed or Athens

• sign and return data access agreement (legal undertaking)

• (to access data) register a usage (formerly a project)

Resources on the ESDS Longitudinal web pages

ESDS Longitudinal

+44 (0)1206 872143www.esds.ac.uk/longitudinal

nesstar.esds.ac.uk/webview/index.jsphelp@esds.ac.uk