Guide to Expenditure and Food Survey
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ESDS Government provides:
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a web-based download service
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specialist user support available via govsurveys@esds.ac.uk
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training and workshops
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a range of value-added data enhancements
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The Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS) is an annual voluntary sample survey of
private households. Each individual aged 16 or over in the household visited is
asked to keep diary records of daily expenditure for two weeks.
Information about regular expenditure, such as rent and mortgage payments, is
obtained from a household interview along with retrospective information on
certain large, infrequent expenditures such as those on vehicles. Since 1998-99
the results have also included information from simplified diaries kept by
children aged between 7 and 15.
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Detailed questions are asked about the income of each
adult member of the household. In addition, personal information such as age,
sex and marital status is recorded for each household member.
Information gathered on food purchase includes food brought home, takeaway
meals eaten at home and food consumed away from home with a very detailed
breakdown of food expenditure. From 2001-2002 the EFS has replaced the National
Food Survey (NFS) and the Family Expenditure Survey (FES).
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Explore the data online
Users registered with the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) have access to
data via the instant download service or can analyse, visualise, subset and
download selected data from the online Nesstar software tool. Nesstar WebView
is a data exploration and analysis tool. It contains all the EFS datasets, as
well as some documentation about the data. Nesstar will allow users to look at
univariate frequencies and variable descriptions without needing to have
registered for the data. This is an excellent way of finding out whether the
data are likely to be suitable for your purposes.
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How to register with ESDS:
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EFS datasets:
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ESDS Nesstar Catalogue:
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Introductory guide to using Nesstar: exploring survey data online:
EFS - ESDS data holdings and planned future
developments
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Data from the EFS are available from 2001-2002 onwards and NFS and FES are
available from 1974 and 1961 respectively. The EFS is due to be integrated into
the Integrated Household Survey together with the Labour Force Survey and
associated boosts, General Household Survey, and Omnibus Survey. Further
information about this new combined survey is available at the Integrated
Household Survey web page:
ESDS will be producing a teaching dataset from the EFS during 2007 which will be
available for use in both substantive and methods learning and teaching. This
is part of ESDS Government's work to develop resources relating to the
'consumption' theme, which will also involve the production of a topic guide
and web pages.
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EFS resources
There are a host of invaluable EFS resources on the web:
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EFS at ESDS Government:
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Publications citing ESDS Government surveys:
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Recent registered usage for the EFS:
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ESDS Government Datasets JISCmail list:
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Family Food - reports at DEFRA:
User documentation
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Questionnaires and user guides (including background information, definitions,
and codebooks) can be downloaded from the ESDS via:
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Expenditure and Food Survey datasets:
Questions and questionnaires are also available from:
Users who are new to the survey may find the getting started guide of interest:
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www.esds.ac.uk/government govsurveys@esds.ac.uk
G33334 Guide to Expenditure and Food Survey
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