British Crime Survey Consultation - Intimate Personal Violence questions

Last year the Home Office ran a split sample experiment to trial an alternative wording of questions relating to intimate personal violence (IPV). Results and analysis of the experiment can be found in the Home Office publication “Analysis of the 2010/11 British Crime Survey intimate personal violence split-sample experiment” available on the Home Office Website: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/analysis-bcs-ipv-2011

The Home Office is currently in the process of a consultation regarding whether to proceed with the new questions, which seem to give us higher affirmative response rates, or the old questions, which would provide us with a longer term time series comparison.

Should you have any response to this consultation, please read the above linked document and pass your comments along with some details of your background interest to ravi.mulchandani@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

Child Benefit National and Official Statistics publications Consultation - two weeks left

HM Revenue & Customs is carrying out a formal review of their Child Benefit National and Official Statistics publications (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/child_benefit/menu.htm ). HMRC are carrying out the consultation to ensure the scope, format and content of their statistics remain suitable for the needs of users.


The survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/child_benefit

HMRC would be grateful if you could spend 5-10 minutes of your time to provide them with the information above by completing the short questionnaire. The results will be published but all results and all views will be completely anonymous. The deadline for reply is 30th September.

Beyond 2011 Census programme

You may be aware that the UK Statistics Authority has stated that the 2011 Census is likely to be the last of its kind in the UK.

The ‘Beyond 2011’ Programme has been established by the Office for National Statistics to take a fresh look at different approaches that will meet future user needs as an alternative to running a Census in 2021. This work, which covers England and Wales, has the potential to completely change the way we produce population and socio-demographic statistics for decades to come.

If you are interested in receiving updates on the progress of the Beyond 2011 Programme, or being involved in the consultation process which will run from October to December 2011, please email beyond2011@ons.gsi.gov.uk.

2011 Census design workshops

To date, consultations on the design of 2011 Census Outputs have concentrated on the main statistical series of outputs. The 2011 Census design team are now planning to hold four workshops on more specialised products and services. These are:

Small populations - 24th October 2011
Analytical products - 25th October 2011
Origin and Destination outputs - 26th October 2011
Microdata - 14th November 2011

For more information, or if you interested in attending one or more of the events, please see:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-census/census-consultations/planned-events/index.html

Alternatively you can email: census.customerservices@ons.gsi.gov.uk

2011 Census homepage :-
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html

2011 Census News and Events
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-census/news-and-events/index.html

Variable Labels for EU-SILC

Programmes to format variable labels in Stata for the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions for both cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets for 2004-2008 have been made available on the RLAB data website http://rlab.lse.ac.uk/itsupport/data/rlabdata/default.asp

Millenium Cohort Survey 6 Consultation - Age 14 Sweep

7th October 2011, 10 am – 5 pm
Woburn House Conference Centre, 20 Tavistock Square. London, WC1H 9HQ

In 2015 the sixth wave of the Millenium Cohort Study will be carried out. The CLS would like to get your views on the priorities and possibilities for what data should be collected from and about the Study children at that point, when they will be aged around 14 years.

For more information on the consultation and why CLS think this is a particularly important point to collect as wide a range of views as possible, not only on what should be collected, but also where (e.g. at home or elsewhere), how (e.g. by personal interview, direct measures and assessments, web self-completion), and who from (e.g. Study members, their parents, others) please see the note on the CLS website http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/events.asp?section=000100010004&item=1129

Input from participants will be preceded by expert overviews from speakers including Paul Gregg, Jane Elliott and Mark Peters.

Whether or not you have actively used the Millennium Cohort Study previously, the study team would value your input.

Registration is free: Please contact Richard Bull (R.Bull@ioe.ac.uk), stating your first and second preference from the themes listed below.

• Education and aspirations
• Attitudes and activities
• Well-being: health and happiness
• Friends and networks
• Risk-taking and victimisation
• Biomeasures

INSPIRE for the social sciences workshop

when: 7 October 2011
where: UK Data Archive, University of Essex, Colchester.

The UK Data Archive and EDINA are hosting a workshop on the European INSPIRE Directive and how this directive matters for the social sciences.

The aim is to bring together academics, data providers and research councils to share what various people are currently doing regarding the INSPIRE Directive - in particular the Annex III data specifications - and to provide a platform to discuss what needs to be done in the near future.

The INSPIRE Directive aims to create an EU spatial data infrastructure to enable the sharing of environmental spatial data among public sector organisations and facilitate public access to spatial information across Europe. This will benefit the development and monitoring of environmental policy and practice in all Member States and across the European Community. Annex III data themes include social sciences domain data on human health and safety, utility and government services, and population distribution and demography.

For further details and to register, please visit http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/news-events/events.aspx?id=2951

This workshop is co-ordinated by the JISC-funded geospatial projects U•Geo and GECO.

The School Workforce Census – Opportunities for Analysis

Tuesday, 27 September 2011, 5pm, at the Royal Statistical Society


The first full collection of the School Workforce Census (SWF) took place in November 2010; the Department for Education subsequently published data from this new source in April 2011. The SWF has been designed to be a single, annual exercise that collects detailed individual level information on school workforce members. Schools and local authorities extract the data from their own management information systems and share this with the Department. This new census has been designed to replace several existing collections and has resulted in more complete data of higher quality on the school workforce.

Officials from the DfE will discuss the issues and challenges involved in moving to this single data collection. Discussion will then turn to analyses undertaken on the SWF census for policy development and the scope for the wider research and statistical community to use this data. In particular, we will present a discussion of the way the new data complement established sources such as Vactrack to answer questions on how many teachers should be trained and how much should be spent on programmes such as the National Professional Qualification for Headship.

Tanya McCormack (Department for Education)
Louise Skelton (Department for Education)
John Howson (DataforEducation.info)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is encouraged. Meeting contact: Charles Lound (charles.lound@ons.gov.uk). For a map and directions see www.rss.org.uk/findus. We expect the meeting will finish by 6:30pm.

Call for Papers: Minimising and Handling Non-response in Sample Surveys

Iers College (Irish College), Leuven, Belgium
Thursday 8 and Friday 9 December 2011

There is a large amount of research on the topic of non-response in sample surveys, from a design as well as from an analysis point of view. This seminar, organised by Jaak Billiet and Gert Molenberghs focuses on practical measures, classical as well as innovative, to address such non-response.

The seminar will host a maximum of 25 participants and we invite the submission of abstracts for presentations addressing the above topics. Abstracts (of no more than 250 words) must be submitted no later than 30 September, 2011.

There is no fee for attending the seminar and participants’ accommodation and subsistence expenses will be covered by the QMSS 2 programme, provided that they come from or are working in one of the 19 countries that support the QMSS 2 programme.

Further details are available from the QMSS 2 website:

http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/qmss/seminars/2011-12-08/call.shtml