 In this video, we'll discuss the key things to consider when searching for data for your own research projects and demonstrate some different ways you can search for this data on the UK Data Service website. Before looking for the data, you'll need to think about your data needs. What topics are you interested in? What's your population of interest? Do you want to measure individuals or larger groups such as businesses or households? What time periods do you need your data to cover? And finally, what are your research questions and how will you measure the key concepts within them? For example, consider the following research question. Has the public become more fearful of crime over time? And does this vary by age? To answer this question, we need data that can be used to make inferences about the population. That is, a large representative sample. That relates to individuals rather than households or any other unit of analysis that has measures of fear of crime and age. And that has the option to get data from different time points. Now you have an idea of your data needs. You can start to search for your data. There are a few ways you can do this. You can use the UK Data Service Catalog Search tool to search for data sets by name or by entering keywords. For example, if we type in Crime Survey for England and Wales and press Enter or click the Search button, all results matching this will appear. One important thing to note when using the catalogue is the difference between studies and series. Under the Studies tab, you will find links to the catalogue pages for individual data sets. These might be for a particular year or wave of a study. To find the most recently released of these data sets, you can use the drop-down menu to sort by most recently released. On the other hand, if you click the Series tab, you will be shown the series pages for certain data sets. For example, here we can see a link to the series page for the Crime Survey for England and Wales and if we click on it, we will be taken to that page. This page provides an abstract for the survey as a whole as well as frequently asked questions and links to all the data sets for this survey. For more detailed information on how to use the catalogue, please see our video on How to Use the UK Data Service Catalogue Search Tool. If you have a general topic of interest, you may find the Browse by Theme option on the Find Data page helpful. For instance, if you are interested in looking at inequalities related to age, you might select Aging, the first theme displayed in the list. You will then be directed to a page listing some of the key sources of data relevant to research on this subject. Clicking on the hyperlink for any of these data sets will take you to the series page for these studies. If you have an idea of the type of data you want to use, such as UK Census data or Qualitative data, for example, you can browse by data type. Again, this can be found on the Find Data page. Selecting the relevant data type will take you to the Data Catalogue, with this data type selected. Here you can explore what is available. You can also filter by data type from within the data catalogue, using the menus on the left-hand side. If you have a specific variable or population characteristic you are interested in, you can try the Variable and Question Bank. The Variable and Question Bank is a search tool that allows you to find and retrieve information about variables and questions from a range of survey data sets held by the UK Data Service. For example, you might be interested in looking at disability. However, not all data sets collect this information, so we can use the Variable and Question Bank to search for variables and questions about it within data sets. You can also search through Qualitative data this way, using the QualiBank search. More information on this and how to use it can be found on the Searching for Data pages on the website. Finally, a search tip. When searching, think about how data from the topic might be indexed and how key concepts might be defined. For example, age is a relatively straightforward thing to measure and most surveys include questions capturing basic demographics. In contrast, fear of crime is more complex and only a small number of surveys are likely to collect relevant information. This search should therefore focus on finding surveys that ask questions about crime and feelings of safety. When you have found a data set, the next step is to evaluate it. For more information on this, please see our video on evaluating data sets.