SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY

PSY6002 Workshops in Psychology/PSY6031 Workshops in Economic Psychology
Basic Research Skills: Bibliographic aids

Accessing other people's data

Health warning
This page has been assembled in a hurry, because it's not a topic I usually have to teach. Watch out for errors and omissions

There are two reasons for wanting to access data that have been collected by other researchers.

Governments and other agencies collect large amounts of statistical information, either as part of government statistical work, or in the course of other government actions. Often this information will provide valuable background to your research - for example, it will enable you to judge whether a small sample you have gathered is typical of the national population. If your sample seems to be atypical, you should be able to assess the ways in which it is unrepresentative, and whether they matter. Some sources of government data are too vast ever to be analysed in full, so each researcher needs to be able to get at the raw (or relatively raw) data in order to ask the specific questions he or she has in mind. Other examples of huge data sets are digital geographical data collected by mapping companies
By using modern bibliographic aids, you can quickly get at the published accounts of other researchers' work. However, what you are then looking at is the particular analyses they have done, and the particular interpretations they have put on them. If you could get at the original data, and carry out new analyses, you might be able to test hypotheses they had not thought of, or examine the strengths of their arguments. Such analyses are what are properly called Secondary Data Analyses.

Because similar information is needed for both these purposes, we will deal with them together. This is a very quick introduction, designed to let you know the kinds of things that might be available - it is certainly not exhaustive. Please let us know of links that you think ought to be added.

Advantages of Secondary Data Analysis

Cost: no need to repeat field work
Time saving (but it can take a long time to get the data into the form needed for analysis)
Quality: Government survey organizations have considerable expertise and relatively massive resources, including the power to compel participation (e.g. in census-taking), so samples are more likely to be of large size and truly representative
Nature of data: It is easier for an organization like a government to carry out panel studies, longitudinal studies, cross-national comparisons and other kinds of research that are extensive in space or time.
Sample sizes are often very large - so small subject groups may still be quite well represented (e.g. old people who are still working).

Disadvantages of Secondary Data Analysis

Quality. Some archive data may be of poor quality. For example, the ESRC data archive contains over 4,500 data sets - some of these will be better than others. Many panel studies (e.g. the VSB study) suffer from participant attrition and missing data
Relevance. The data will not have been gathered with your own research question in mind, so it may be hard to bring them to bear correctly on your hypotheses.
Sampling. You cannot control the sampling design and procedure - so you need to investigate this very thoroughly and think about its implications
Bias to quantitative studies. Until recently, it was only the data from quantitative studies that were routinely archived, though there is now a growing archive of qualitative data in the UK.

One way of overcoming these problems is to construct indices, in which you bring together responses to a number of items on the original survey to give you a measure of the quantity you are really interested in. Such an index should of course be tested for reliability and validity just like a scale you are developing through primary analysis.

National and international data

Many of the following notes about government data sources are specific to the UK. Similar sources will be available for many other countries; obviously the longer the country has been independent and had a stable national government, and the less its history has been disrupted by invasion, occupation, colonisation, and revolution, the better the data are likely to be. Supranational organizations are good sources for cross-national data; the UN and its daughter organizations, particularly UNESCO and the ILO (International Labor Organization), produce many tables of statistics, and the EU is becoming increasingly important as a source of European data. Such cross-national tabulations frequently involve a good deal of forcing to get the data for different countries onto a common footing. Academic sources are more likely to run across national boundaries, even when located in a single country - for example, the ESRC Data Archive gives access to data from many North American studies as well as research done in the UK.

Sources of summary data

The data sources listed here do not, in general, give you access to raw data that you can analyse for yourself, though in some cases you may be able to specify what kind of analysis you would like.

The CIA World Fact Book is a well-known web resource, which gives basic data about almost every country in the world. Its web address is http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html
European Union information can be found at the Europa site; the English language version is at http://europa.eu.int/index-en.htm. Directorate-General X of the European Commission carries out a number of regular surveys: for information about these try http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg10/infcom/epo/org.html. A well known one is the Eurobarometer; there is an index to recent reports on the web at http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg10/infcom/epo/eb.html. The EU's comparative statistics on the labour market in Europe, available in book form and (probably) also electronically, are also useful.
A simple summary of facts and figures about the UK can be located at the UK in figures web page, whose address is http://www.statistics.gov.uk/stats/ukinfigs/ukinfig.htm. More detailed information comes from the Office of National Statistics' Statbase service at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/mainmenu.asp
Most local councils in the UK have web pages that will include some statistics about their areas. Tagish Ltd have collected a list of local government web pages at http://www.tagish.co.uk/tagish/links/localgov.htm; the Devon County Council web pages are at http://www.devon-cc.gov.uk

Surveys with at least some access to underlying data

UK government statistics are collected by the Office of National Statistics. There is a comprehensive web site describing its activites at http://www.ons.gov.uk, and a catalogue of the statistics it makes available at http://www.ons.gov.uk/data.htm. For most of the following surveys, results are published in book form, and these regular publications can be found in most university libraries. However, accessing the data over the web can be much more convenient. For a sceptical look at what goes into national statistics (and what comes out of them), see the book edited by Dorling and Simpson (1999).

UNESCO provides a variety of database services; there is an introduction to them at http://www.unesco.org/general/eng/infoserv/db/index.html
Information about the International Labor Organization's database services is at http://www.ilo.org/public/english/190bibl/index.htm
The World Bank produces the World Tables of socio-economic data; for information see http://www.ciesin.org/IC/wbank/wtables.html
The European Union's Europa website gives access to a number of databases of European statistics; for a list see http://europa.eu.int/geninfo/search/databases_en.htm
The most important data source any national government provides is the Census. In the UK, researchers can access summary tables over the web, and also get access to the detailed data. There is a web page devoted to dissemination of census information at http://census.ac.uk/cdu/ Access for academic purposes is generally free at time of use; commercial users have to negotiate paid access. At the time of this revision, I am not sure what the future arrangements will be, but the census dissemination web site should give up-to-date information. In the UK as in many other countries, the main census takes place every 10 years, but a percentage sample (still very large by academic standards) is taken in mid-cycle.
The ONS makes regular economic data available in electronic format - but this is a subscription service: for information see http://www.ons.gov.uk/databank.htm.
The UK General Household Survey (GHS), which has been taken annually since 1971, covers health, housing, education, employment, and many other matters in more detail than the Census. Data from 1977 on are available online through the Mimas gateway at the University of Manchester (http://www.mimas.ac.uk), and need to register as users of Mimas first. NB Mimas was previously known as Midas. For information about the GHS on Mimas, see http://www.mimas.ac.uk/surveys/ghs.
The UK Family Expenditure Survey, taken annually since 1957, has its primary focus on the income and expenditure of households. Data are collected partly by interview and partly by diaries. The data are very detailed, including for example information about children's pocket money, gifts, books, etc. Raw data available through Mimas; for information see http://www.mimas.ac.uk/surveys/fes.
The UK Labour Force Survey, also available through Mimas; for information see http://www.mimas.ac.uk/surveys/lfs.
The UK National Child Development Study, also available through Mimas; for information see http://www.mimas.ac.uk/surveys/ncds.
British Social Attitudes (an annual survey), whose results are held in the ESRC Data Archive.
Social Trends: An annual book publication summarising a variety of UK statistics. Underlying data are available to subscribers, see http://www.ons.gov.uk/subdata/strends/index.htm
The Longitudinal Study, which is conducted by ONS, has its own website at http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/Ls/lshomepage.html
The VSB panel study, being carried out in the Netherlands, focusses on economic behaviour and is of particular interest to economic psychologists. It is organized by CentER at the Katholieke Universiteit Brabant (Tilburg University), and it is possible for researchers to go and work at Tilburg for short periods to make use of the data. It is also possible to access the data over the Internet, though you have to register as a user - Exeter researchers should contact Paul Webley for further advice.

References

Dorling, D., & Simpson, S. (1999). Statistics in society. London: Arnold

Paul Webley, Stephen Lea

University of Exeter

School of Psychology

Washington Singer Laboratories

Exeter EX4 4QG

United Kingdom

Tel +44 1392 264626

Fax +44 1392 264623

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(access count since 24th November 1998).
Document revised 23rd August 1999 by SEGL