 Hello and welcome to this webinar on using UK data service data in dissertations and my name is Jen and I work at the University of Manchester and part of the UK data service user in support and training team. Okay so let's go so here's an overview of what I'll be talking about and I'm going to start with a short introduction to the UK data service. I'll briefly talk about finding and accessing data and then move on to give an overview of the resources that we have that are particularly useful for students doing dissertations and then I'll finish by talking about our dissertation award and I'm going to speak for about 15 minutes and then we'll have time for questions and I deliberately kept this session brief with the aim of not repeating too much of the information that's found elsewhere but I will also be highlighting where to go next if you want more information. This is a new webinar topic for us and so we're hoping to find out more about what's useful for students and so any feedback afterwards will be very useful. When it comes to time for questions you can ask them by typing into a questions box that's part of the webinar control panel. If you can't see it look for an arrow that maximizes and minimizes the control panel and feel free to type the questions they come to you and I can pick them all up at the end and just let you know that you will be on loop throughout the webinar. So what is the UK Data Service? So it's a research resource that allows people to access a wide range of social science data. We also provide training and support through activities such as webinars and we're funded to do this work by the ESRC which is the Economic and Social Research Council. So what kind of data do we have? So the wide range of data in our catalogue includes data from surveys of the UK and other countries, longitudinal studies that follow individuals through time, the data from the UK Census and data from qualitative studies such as interview transcripts and field notes and international macro data such as the World Bank indicators. And together the data in our collection cover a wide range of social science topics including things like work, family life, health and finances. So at this point I have a quick quiz question for you and which of the following, here we go, so which of the following do we have in our collection? Because many of you think we have, so we've got 30 years of data from a survey of British public opinion, interview transcripts relating to the regulation of finger, samples of records from the UK Census, transcripts of parliamentary debates and data from George and Boyle in 2006 time points. 30 years of data from the survey of British public opinion, most of you think that's right and that relates to the British Social Attitude Survey. Interview transcripts relating to the regulation of finger and we do have this in our collection, so it comes from one of the qualitative studies in our collection that looks at the regulation of this profitable gambling form and samples of records from the UK Census, so researchers can access census micro data which are samples of individual records from the Census that have been fully anonymized, transcripts of parliamentary debates, so yes this is something that we don't have and researchers can access this and it's available through Hansard but not from the UK Data Service and data from George and Boyle in 2005 time points. This comes from the Millennium Coal Study, so this is a longitudinal study that's been following the lives of people born at the start of the millennium. You might also ask why you might want to use our data in a dissertation, so the big one is that it can save resources such as time and money which can be very limited when doing an undergraduate dissertation and it can also mean you can use data that you couldn't collect yourself and therefore do research that you couldn't do otherwise, so for example you might be able to use data from previous points in time from different countries and also be able to access large nationally representative samples, so naturally there are some disadvantages too, so you might not find suitable data for your research topic or the data might not be perfect and it can also be a challenge to understand the data. How do we find data? So there is a searchable data catalog, you just pick search terms a bit like Google and then there are ways to refine and sort your search. You can also access the catalog and so you can access the catalog from the homepage and also under the get data section of our website. Under get data we also have lists of key data sets by data type under the called key data and there are also theme pages that link to a variety of collections and resources for key topics. So when it comes to access to data our main message is that students can access the majority of the data in our collection for their research projects, but there are different access arrangements in place and some data cannot be accessed for undergraduate research projects. So first we've got some open data sets that these are available without registration or needing to join your authentication and that of our data is classed as safe guarded and is available within end-user license, so this is still easily accessible but it does require registration. The student research projects students should register individually so a lecturer shouldn't be giving out data and you shouldn't really use data from previous classes or like learning and teaching. Students and members of staff at UK institutions of higher or further education can register using the their user their institutional username and passwords. So what will happen is when you come to sign in you'll be directed to your own institution or login. You'll need to fill out the short form and agree to some conditions and then once it comes to downloading a data set you'll have to set up a project. You'll need to give your project a name so for example dissertation project on top of text and to give a short description. Don't worry if you don't have all the details sorted when you come to write the description just write what you can and then you come to assigning the data to your project and you can download it. Special license data comes with additional conditions that need to be fulfilled before you can access the data. These special conditions vary and they may or may not prevent student access. So read the conditions and see in some cases the filling the conditions can actually take time so for example sometimes we have to go back to the data owners and that permission and that process can take time which could be a problem when you're working through a deadline so think about whether you'd be able to work with that and if at any point it's not clear to you contact us at last. Finally control data in our classroom relates to data where participants could possibly be identified and for this reason access to control data is limited and it isn't available to undergraduate students doing research projects. In addition to downloading data some data collections can be accessed via online tools and two of these are Nesta which is a tool for exploring many of the survey data sets we have and also UKPS.stat is a tool for exploring international databases. These online tools allow you to explore data and make things like tables and graphs which can then be downloaded and this option can be good for students who are perhaps collecting their own data and but are looking for additional data to perhaps support their dispersion so for example if they want to include a chart showing the prevalence of some social phenomenon. You can find and we've got lots of guides for using these most individual tutorials on our website and now we're going to talk about some of the key resources so first all the topics that I've mentioned very briefly and so far we're all discussed in more detail in other UK data service webinars so we were about to host three introductory webinars which provide more information about our service things like finding and accessing data and then also key issues in reusing data and we are also involved in organizing themed webinars which talk about data specific areas of research so we've got three coming up soon they're on religion, language, spoken and mental health and you can sign up for webinars through the events section of our website. All our past webinars are also available on our YouTube channel and so for instance you can find key data webinars which all focus on one of the specific types of data that we have in our catalog which is survey data or census data and most of our resources that we have are available under the news data section of our website and a really good place to start is for students as our student source pages so these pages give things like information about the types of data we've got, advice on getting started and they highlight them with better resources for students and they also link to a guide that we have called using survey data which is specifically written for dissertation students so the using survey data guide focuses on project work based on survey data and it covers different aspects of the research process including things like developing research questions and designs, finding and accessing data and getting started with data analysis and there's examples and also worksheets to help you through and the guide is available both online and as a PDF. Also we have got another dissertation related guide and dissertations and their data promoting research integrity. This guide will be particularly useful to students and supervisors where there's a project that's about collecting data and it gives really useful examples of what to do and includes templates things like such as model consent forms that you can use. Back to using data, if you want to learn more about survey, longitudinal fabricate data you might find our online data skills modules useful. These free modules introduce key aspects of data using videos, quizzes and activities. So for example the survey module covers how a survey data set is structured, how to examine relationships between variables and something and the two pages also link through to the dissertation award. So this has just been relaunched through this academic year and the award is aimed to recognize outstanding undergraduate dissertations from within the social sciences that include excellent reuse of data and we'll be looking to award the three best dissertations from the academic year. Each winner will receive a £300 award and publicity via our website, blog and newsletter. Those were previous versions, there was a slight change from before where we used to recognize the sort of first, second and third. This time it will be the three best dissertations. So who can enter? It's open to undergraduate students at UK universities from any social sciences and then the students must have been provided UK data service to end using their institutional email by the 18th of May and if shortlisted you'll then be asked to submit the full dissertation to the judges to be aware that you might need to do this at the end of May and then we will announce the winners in July. Just have a look at the entry form. So we've tried to keep the entry form as simple as possible as we understand students are busy and tired at this point of the year and we ask for the title of the dissertation, we ask you to indicate clearly which data you used. You need to describe the research aims and questions so what did you want to find out and why and in no more than 200 words. We also want to know about the data and methods you use and how they suited research aims. So for instance why was that data set that you used the best to use and this bit's important as it's where we can see that there's been some real thought into the use of data. Finally you need to briefly explain your findings and their implications and at this point we want you to include some kind of example of the data you've used to draw your conclusions so it might be one of your good graphs that you've done or a really insightful excerpt from an interview. So you might find it interesting useful to look at previous year's entries. You can see here we've had an interesting mix of topics and datasets. Today we've only received entries using quantitative data and methods but we do welcome entries using qualitative data and we're also open to entries where data available from the UK Data Service has been combined with data from other sources such as the one here at the bottom where data from the census was linked to data from GP practices. So you can read more about these previous entries. There's a link on the dissertation award page which takes you to the title and abstract for the winners from previous years. So to offer some conclusion I'll emphasize that students can access most of our data for their dissertations and there are many good reasons to use data from the UK Data Service. If you do choose to use some of these data sources spend some time thinking about what's realistic so for example some datasets are more complex than others and perhaps look to the student pages and these highlight some of those that might be best for people who are starting out. Also look to see if there are any guides that might be able to help you and we also have a help desk for specific data related queries. We can't offer advice about sort of dissertation plans but we can help if you have a particular problem understanding one of our datasets. When it comes to doing your references the catalogue page for each dataset contains citation information for citing the data that you've used and most of all if you do use our data think about entering the UK Data Service dissertation award.