In the spotlight - highlighted collections from 2006
As another year begins this is an ideal opportunity to
describe the diversity of the ESDS data collection by introducing some important
collections acquired and processed during 2006.
From ESDS Longitudinal comes the second sweep of the
Millennium Cohort Study focusing on
the children from the first study, now aged three. Information was gathered on
parenting activities, the child's health, child care arrangements, grandparents
and friends, and a range of information on the parents' employment, income and
education. The
English Longitudinal Study of Ageing was also acquired. This is
the first study in the UK to connect the economic, social, psychological and
health elements of the ageing process.
An important MORI housing study -
National Evaluation of the New Deal for Communities Programme: Household Survey
Data, 2002-2004 - was added to the core collection. For this, baseline household
surveys were conducted in each of the 39 areas in England in 2002, with
follow-up interviews in 2004.
As part of their 2006 theme of ethnicity,
ESDS Government specially prepared a teaching dataset based on the
Quarterly
Labour Force Survey (QLFS) of June - August 2005. The
Flexible Working and Leave
Arrangements Module of the ONS Omnibus Survey was also released. This survey
investigates working patterns including whether employees are aware of new
rights to help parents balance their work and childcare responsibilities more
effectively.
An important milestone for ESDS Qualidata was the
acquisition of the
Health and Social Consequences of the Foot and Mouth Disease
Epidemic in North Cumbria, 2001-2003, as the study includes a number of audio
files. Equally,
Resisting Subjugation: Law and Power amongst the Santal of India
and Bangladesh, 2002-2004 represents the first internal processing of a
collection including files from the
Atlas.ti qualitative software
package.
ESDS International acquired two data releases from the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the
OECD
Structural Analysis database and the
OECD National Accounts database. The
datasets can be accessed via data delivery software Beyond 20/20 WDS and
associated support materials are available from the ESDS International web
site.
Article dated: 04 January 2007
