 Survey documentation can help you to use the survey data that's available from the UK Data Service. This video discusses how to find and use these documents when you're looking for or working with survey data. A good place to start are our catalogue pages. Each data collection has its own catalogue page. I'm on the catalogue page for the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2019-2020. Catalogue pages contain lots of useful information. For example, in the abstract we have information about the sample and the population, what's in the different data files and other releases of data from the survey. Documentation is collated together on a dedicated tab on the catalogue page. The documents that you'll find here will vary from survey to survey, but three common elements are copies of the survey materials such as the questionnaire, so you can see what questions were asked, some technical reporting of the sampling procedures and also response rates, and then information about the data files and the variables that you find in the data that you download. These different elements might come as several documents or be combined into a larger user guide. In this case, we have a questionnaire and a separate user guide. Inside the questionnaire we find it includes both the full wording of questions and the question routing, so this is information about how respondents were directed through the questionnaire. Most survey documents come as searchable PDFs, meaning you can search for specific words or variable names, but if working with older data you will also come across scans of type written documents. Turning to the user guide now, in the contents page we can see it includes information about the survey design and fieldwork, the data structure and survey weights. Since September 2018 we've also been including zip files containing data dictionaries. These data dictionaries provide a list and then summary information for each variable in a data file, so they're a very useful way of getting to know what's inside a data set before you download it. You'll also find README file produced by the UK Data Service. These files summarise how the data has been processed by us and perhaps most relevantly they sometimes include notes if any issues with the data have been found. For each study the same documentation is also included when you download the data. I have a folder here for study number 8915 which is the Quarterly Labor Force Survey from October to December 2021. In the main folder you can see the README file. There is also a document listing all the different documentation files available. The rest of the documentation is in the folder called MR DOC. This time we find multiple PDFs. The LFS is some of the most extensive documentation with a user guide split into multiple volumes. Each volume provides specific information, so for example volume 3 provides detailed information about each variable. Finally derived variables are another important topic covered in user documentation. These are variables made by a survey team using one or more other variables. For the Labor Force Survey information about derived variables is included in volume 4 which includes flowcharts that detail how each derived variable has been made. In this video we've talked about the survey documentation that can help us understand and use survey data. The documentation can vary from study to study but using these documents you can find details of the survey design, the questions asked in a survey and the variables in the data sets that you can download. If you have any difficulty finding or understanding the documentation that's available online or with the data visit the help section of our website where you can find information and contact us via our help desk.