 Okay, hello and welcome to this webinar on how to find data in Europe organised by CESTA. My name is Jen Bucklin, I'm based at the University of Manchester and work with the UK Data Service and I will be joined today by Oliver Mothler from GASIS. Okay, so here's an overview of the webinar and we're going to start with a short background to CESTA and social science data services. I will then discuss some data that's available, how to find an answer to this. And then take a look at two national data services in some detail. So first we'll look at CESTA in Germany and then the UK Data Service and these are two of the largest in Europe. There will then be time for questions and you can ask your questions by typing them into the questions box on the webinar panel. This box is normally to the right of your screen. If you can't see it, you may need to maximise the box by clicking on a red arrow box. You can type questions at any point but we'll pick them up and answer them at the end. So CESTA, CESTA is the consortium of European Social Science Data Archives and its vision is to provide a full scale sustainable research infrastructure that enables the research community to conduct high quality research. And the key tasks underlying this vision include developing standards and practices around the management and archiving of social science data and also facilitating researcher access to these important resources. Some of this work is done through providing training and also by coordinating the network of European Data Service providers. So national data services are the core operational bodies in CESTA. So national data services provide access to offensive collections of data useful for social and economic research. You may be familiar with the service in your country or some of the larger data services that operate in Europe and many of the data services that are in Europe are members of CESTA. So this image on your screen is from CESTA website and it highlights the different national data services that are in Europe. So social science data typically combine the archiving of research data with some activities to make that data available for research, teaching and learning. Core activities include in checking data and metadata, maintaining catalogs and managing access to data. Many services also seek to obtain data for their collection and to develop training for both as creating data and for users of data. The range of data available is diverse so many services have both quantitative and qualitative data in their collections so quantitative data from social surveys is the most prevalent. Data can come from major academic projects which are often designed which is ideal to share in your mind but national data services also provide access to data collections from governments and policy-focused organisations and then also smaller research teams and individual researchers. Facts of such as an interest in extending the benefits of investment in research and making research transparent are supporting trends towards greater archiving and sharing of data. So some examples of key data collections. Doing that after the webinar, the slides and some supplementary materials about studies and data services mentioned will be made available to you so don't worry too much about catching all the details. So many European countries participate in international survey programmes. One example is the International Social Survey programme. This is an annual programme of cross-national collaboration on surveys and it consists of thematic modules and a range of topics including the role of government, family change, changing gender roles, the environment, health and healthcare. And then these modules are then rotated across different years so for example citizenship module has been run in 2004 and 2014. Another good example is SHARE. SHARE is a survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe and this survey is longitudinal that collects data from more than 120,000 individuals aged 50 or older and that's in 27 European countries out in Threl. SHARE then provides micro-data on health, socioeconomic status, social and family networks and is a major resource for research into aging. Many of the cross-national studies and also some national studies have dedicated infrastructures and websites distributing data such as this one for SHARE and this one for the European Social Survey. And these portals are a really valuable resource containing relevant documentation for the data, information about access and additional resources such as reports and publications on both substantive findings and methodological missions. Access to other sort of some of the cross-national studies is via one of the national data services for example data for international social survey programmes which is available by ACES in Germany. You are responsible for harmonising and integrating all the individual national data sets that form the integrated data set. We can also highlight Eurostat as a source of cross-national data in Europe. Eurostat is the physical office of the European Union and the key task of Eurostat is at the European level that enables comparison between countries and regions and there is also access to micro-data. So for example there is the European Union statistics on income and living conditions that EU took and that provides record data on income, poverty and living conditions and there is also the European Union labour force survey which gives harmonising data on employment and related topics. Another example is long-achieve national studies. So long-achieve national studies are a precious resource for social and economic research. As by tracking the same individuals over time they enable analysis to change at an individual level and on the screen here these are household panel studies and they each follow households over time and ask questions on a broad range of topics such as employment in buildings, health and life satisfaction such as social and political participation. The German Citadel at Panelist study of nearly 11,000 households that started in 1984. Understanding of the site is a very large study which follows the lives of 40,000 UK households and that started in 2009 but it also incorporates participants in all the panel studies at that point in time. The Swiss household panel study started in 1999 in the sample of just over 5,000. So it had to find data from national data services. So national data services have websites with online catalogs for searching and browsing. The example on the screen here is the catalogue of dams in the Netherlands and these catalogs allow you to search using terms such as ages. Searching large archives can be demanding and you can get a lot of results to consider but the tools generally are for ways to sort and refine your results that are sorted by date. Language can be an issue so unfortunately websites and catalogs are often in multiple languages so typically the national languages of the country and also English but sometimes there's other physical dams and documentation may only be available in one language. When searching it can also be useful to consider alternative spelling such as key expressions. Here's another example from Ford in Switzerland so their online platform, Ford Space, allows researchers to register research projects and to store and share their data so then others can obtain information about social science studies and then also access other data. As you can see here the list of studies tells you whether there was archive data and there's also an option to search just for entries with data. Many data sets providers use an online platform called Nestar so Nestar enables online data browsing and also analysis. You can also download tables, graphs, data files and study descriptions. Some data sets use Nestar as their main tool for searching and accessing data while others use Nestar as a separate tool to their lean catalog. Using Nestar the help pages are lots of helpful user guidance and can be accessed at any time by clicking the question mark at the top of the screen. You can find information and links to all of the national databases on the Nestar website. In June there will be a new look to the Nestar website and we'll be adding lots of useful resources including a recording of this webinar. A reasonable question is why is there not just one single catalog in Nestar? It is with Nestar finding that setting data much easier but fortunately this is in progress so SESDA are currently building a catalog and it's due to go into service in 2018 and when operational you'll be able to search for data sources from all SESDA service providers. A further tool to highlight those within the survey data are variable and question banks like this one from the Swedish National Data Service. These allow you to search for variables and questions across data sets. This functionality is useful for finding through these other relevant questions and also the use of the same question across different surveys. It can also be useful for those designing service because they give examples of question design. Not all services have a variable and question bank but again SESDA are developing a European question bank which should be very useful for finding similar questions across different countries. So having found data, what do you do to get it? A general principle within SESDA that all data holding will be available regardless of status, nation, or type of use except if you are redistributing them or if there are other known requirements which prevent it. In practice you will generally find that you can access most data collections through simple registration process. However, access arrangements do vary across data services and across different data collections and the differences largely reflect the needs of those who hold the data and their need to protect the anonymity of research for dispensers is an important factor. So here are some arrangements in place across data services. So first, some services support access to open data collections which can be downloaded by any type of user without registration. But as I said you normally do need to register data so this before accessing data. In some cases, university researchers register using their institutional details like their username and password otherwise you need to provide an email address and possibly institutional details. You may also for services need to wait to receive a username and password before you can access data. In some cases you may be asked to auto-register the use of data and this is a requirement which really helps data creators and also data services understand the impact of their works on how data is being used. You will usually be agreeing to terms and conditions as part of the registration process or when accessing data and common terms and conditions that will finally be not trying to identify individuals, households and organizations in the data and not distributing the data to others. Some restrictions about the use of data are also common so most typically you might find that data is among commercial use only or use in research or teaching only. Often you download data directly from the password but some services ask you to register to make a request for the data. Additionally access to some data collections may require permission from the data owners and then this adds a sort of additional stage to the access procedure. Also more strict applications generally operate the data collections considered to contain sensitive or confidential data and some services operate sort of dedicated safe rooms or remote settings for analyzing this kind of data. Finally access to data documentation and metadata is generally free but charges can apply in some cases for commercial use or for supplementary services such as burning data to a CD. You should find access conditions for each data collection displayed clearly in the catalogue and also if you are unsure you can ask the data service for help and we have also produced some materials which we will give at the end of the webinar with some more detailed information about finding and accessing data from national data services. So a key issue in secondary data analysis is how to make sense of the data to understand the meaning of data and to evaluate the suitability of your research question you need to know things like what information was collected and what was done to the resulting data. And the core aim is that all data collections have documentation that allows use without the course of the data creator. So documentation might include user guides, survey questionnaires, interview schedules and field work notes and this documentation is usually accessible directly from the catalogue and will come as things like PDF documents that allow you to search but format and quality varies especially for the old studies. Some services where the resources allow offers support to help users understand data through things like help desks and also by training. Finally when using existing data it is good practice to cite the data. So data citations give credit to the data creators and they also allow other researchers to find the data. So in general the citation should include information so that the exact version of the data being cited can be located. And usefully many services provide a recommended citation for each of their data collections and some also provide a persistent identifier such as a digital object identifier of DOI. So here's an example from UK Data Service for Understanding Society. So at this point I will hand over to Oliver who will talk to us about the GASIS Data Archive in Germany. Hi everyone. I hope you can see the slides. I have a short presentation on GASIS the Lightning Institute for the Social Sciences. We are one of the leading social science infrastructures in Europe with over 50 years of experience along with institutions like the UKDA Data Service. The data archive was founded in 1960 very much in line with what Jen just presented for CESTA. Our objective is our research-based infrastructure services mainly distributing data but also other things around the data. And we do interdisciplinary research. GASIS covers the entire life cycle of the data so we are also a data gathering organization for example for the German General Social Survey and our focus here is on surveys. We have five departments among them is the data archive for the social sciences. What are the objectives and tasks? We want to advance social science by promoting wide data sharing. The better the data we offer the better for research. Our tasks are to provide this high quality data and data services so you can always email and contact us about details of the data. We do data confrontation seminars and other things. We also develop standards and infrastructure solutions for data sharing. We are developing an XML standard for the exchange of metadata and we conduct research on social change and as well on archiving and data management. The data archive holds close to 6,000 studies mostly surveys with a strong focus on international comparison. Jen has just pointed out to this. Those surveys are probably among the most widely used data sets in the social sciences. We do have a collection of time series most economic time series but also social indicators and we have a small set of historical data so historians using social science methods to gather data from archives and other sources. We are home to the International Social Survey Program. The German General Social Survey forms part of this but also for example we have a strong hold on election studies the comparative study of electoral systems and the German National Election Study or one very prominent survey series is the Eurobarometer survey series commissioned by the European Commission for 600 surveys by now and you can access the data through our website there's a screenshot here and the demonstration I will just show you briefly how to get to our catalog that's probably the most valuable information you want to take home from this webinar it's the main access point. We do also run a Nesta server SSP or the Eurobarometers which is called ZAKAT and we also have specialized websites for collections so let me just briefly stop the presentation and move in our website here live I guess you can see this you can search the website via this possibility up here search cases but if you go under services and then research this will take you to all search possibilities all search tools the main point is the data holding catalog up here and you can also go directly to the data catalog down here which enables you to do a more detailed search with more keywords let me just show you the catalog it looks very much like catalogs you probably know for years from libraries or other data services you've got your simple and advanced search possibilities and if we look for example for the German General Social Survey which is called the Albus 2016 the search will take you to the holdings and here you've got the two versions of the Albus a compact and a complete version and if you click on the title here this will take you to a full description of the study including information on methods data and documents but also this is related to the DOI that Jan mentioned of errors in the data that have been discovered and versions so most of the main collections do have several versions of the data so watch out when you cite your data to properly name the version and if you go to data and documentation this will take you directly to the data sets and you can either download the data after registering that is true for most of our holdings so if you click on SAF this is the SPSS version this will ask you to log in you first have to create an account which is an easy two-step process it will send you a login name and a password and then you can download this data for free for academic research and teaching and also as mentioned before there are some restricted data sets as well so we have some times we do have to ask data providers, primary investigators for their admission to distribute the data and for a number of data sets a very small number of data sets we do run a secure data center for on-site analysis but all information is available through the catalog so as you can see here there's the access class which tells you if you are allowed to access the data set or not if there are any restrictions applying in terms of use and here you can also go to the documents that are related to the survey let me close this and back to the presentation we've seen this as I said mainly we're offering data for scientific reuse there are time series and very few data sets which are available to the general public as open access there are four access classes and all users can register there are no national restrictions those sometimes apply so if you want to access a data repository in another country they might tell you either contact your national data archive or data distributor or register via a national service or in a few cases you are not allowed to access data at all but we do not impose any restrictions we do run a facility that's called Eurolab which grants for research visits so if you are looking at analyzing any of the data sets we are offering and you would like to exchange information or your research experience with the staff working on the data and our scientific staff you are happy to apply for one of those grants and as I said before we do have a secure data center for access to more sensitive we do not offer any official micro data that is only done by the statistical offices in Germany but there are some data sets that we deem sensitive in a way so you can only access them on site that's from my side back to Jen thank you okay thank you just got my screen back up here okay so I'm just going to talk a little bit now about the UK data service so the UK data service is the UK's largest collection of social, economic and population data and we also give a lot of support to users through training and guidance here are the main types of data that we have available so the cloud collection includes major UK and cross sectional surveys including major cross sectional surveys on topics such as crime, health and family resources there are a number of longitudinal studies so for example in addition to understanding society which I mentioned earlier there is also some major cohort studies which are following individuals that were born in 1958, 1970 and 2000 and this international macro data these contain social, economic time series data aggregated to a country or regional level there are a range of countries and over a substantial time period so many of these data banks are current releases of the major statistical publications produced by organisations such as the World Bank, IMF and OECD there's also data from the UK census from 1971 to 2011 and we have some qualitative data collections as well and these things like indexed interview transcripts diaries and prological field reports answers to open-ended survey questions there is also some business and administrative data although these have more limited access rights the UK data service also has an online repository called ReShare for researchers to archive and publish and share their research data and this helps support the requirement for researchers with grants from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council to archive the data from their research projects with regard to access most data is available to anyone following registration with the UK data service otherwise there are some open data collections that are available for anyone to use without registration those in UK higher education can use institutional rockings to register otherwise users need to apply for the UK data archive user name and password we also have a secure data lab and a safe room for sensitive or confidential data there's lots of information on the website about using these services but note that users not in the UK cannot access control data via the secure lab most data sets can be downloaded directly from the website and for many surveys you can also use my staff and I'll take you to the website and give you a short tour so this is our homepage from here you can access data and resources and links to training events you can start finding data by just typing a search term into the central box on the front so I'm going to type in help as an example and then this will take you through to the new discover which is our search tool the discover will search for the word in the type or description or keyword for a survey sorry for data holding and here are the results for help there's over 3,000 results in total and the site of the collection does make it sometimes hard to find the right data but there's the options to sort down here and then also to refine the search so you can look for specific data types you can narrow the time period that you're looking for or sort of spatial levels or units of analysis there's also a variable and question down which can be accessed here so we can type again typing in help and then it brings up questions related to health we have a guide available with more information about how to find data and using the discover search tool so all the methods are finding data are available under the get data menu we've got theme pages which help find data so for key themes such as aging, crime, economics it lists the most relevant data collections for researching of these topics key data is also a really useful way to find the major data collections so these are listed under the main different types of data and it lists over the UK surveys it lists all the major surveys that are happening so to take you through to access data click on this this is one of the British Social Action Surveys it's been running for 30 years and this is a series page for this survey and through here you can access all the individual surveys for each year and if I click on this it takes you through to the catalogue page a little bit slowly but hopefully here we go so this provides all the summary information about the data collection so there's an abstract descriptive information and then there's a summary of what the data relates to and then also access to all the documentation that supports the data set to access the data you click download and order and if needed it will then prompt you to either login or to register as a new user to analyse online in Leicester there's a button here that takes you through to the Leicester catalogue and you can see all of the data that we have available in Leicester here and in addition to Leicester we have other tools for exploring online so for example we have UKDS.stat which is an interface for exploring the socioeconomic international data sets and that has tools for creating graphs and then downloading parts of the data we have guides and other resources available through the use data menu and these include written guide and video tutorials and they cover different data sets topics, methods and also software the news and events provide details of our training courses and other training courses that are available in the UK and there's information about webinars and other kind of events that are occurring and help can be accessed here at the top right and this will take you through to several frequently asked questions pages which cover a lot of key issues about finding and accessing data and also our email help desk. Thank you very much for attending today both me and from Oliver.