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/[email protected]
