Conference of the Migration Statistics User Forum

18th September 2012
Home Office HQ, 2 Marsham Street, London SWIP 4DF

The Migration Statistics User Forum is holding a conference on 18 September in partnership with the Home Office.  Details of the event are now available, including a draft programme and details of how to book a place. These can be viewed at www.rss.org.uk/migration-statistics.

This conference is open to all those with an interest in migration statistics and there is no charge for this event but pre-registration is essential. Please email MigrationStatsEnquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk if you have any questions not answered at the above conference details webpage.

This day conference has been designed to appeal to a wide range of users of international migration statistics and relates to the Migration Statistics User Forum’s aim to provide a forum where users and producers can discuss the need, presentation and use of data on migration.

The conference programme has speakers from Home Office Statistics, the Office for National Statistics and users of the statistics. The day is also designed to allow lots of scope for discussion and questioning. Details of the draft programme are contained in the above weblink.

Olympics – participation, performance and legacy

3 July 2012, 5pm,

Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London, EC1Y 8LX

With the London Olympics about to begin, we recognise the important contribution statistics make in the measurement of sporting participation, the improvement of sporting performance and in measuring the lasting impact of the Games.

The speakers will be:

Andrew Spiers, Sport England

Measuring public participation in sport including the challenges of collecting data for detailed estimates in a social survey

Beverley Hale, University of Chichester

Studies and statistics leading to advances in performance-based knowledge and success in an Olympic Setting

Alex Wilkinson, Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Describing the plans for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Meta-Evaluation which will look across a large number of surveys, programme and project-level evaluations and other studies to measure the impacts and legacy of the Games.

Tea/coffee served from 4.30pm. Attendance is free and open to all, but pre-registration is

recommended. You can register by emailevents@rss.org.uk or by phone (020) 7638 8998.

For further information about the meeting, contact Charles Lound (charles.lound@ons.gov.uk). For directions, see www.rss.org.uk/findus.

Data Horizons Questionnaire

This survey is an exploratory study of social science data users and those involved in data support services.

As part of the ESRC funded Digital Social Research programme, a team at Manchester University is conducting a scoping review of the changes in the data environment and the innovations that will be necessary to use social science data in the future.

Alongside the well documented expansion in the quantity of data, categorical shifts in the type and form of that data are happening and will continue to do so. Understanding the form that these shifts will take in the short, medium and long term, what the resultant data will look like and how we might use them is vital for the planning and development of the social science resource base and for the training of the next generation of social science researchers.

Please complete this short scoping questionnaire. https://selectsurveys.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=DATA_HORIZONS

All responses will be treated confidentially.

It should only take 15 minutes to complete and your input is very important.

You will also be entered into the prize draw for £50 of book vouchers.

ESDS R Guide to Large-Scale Government Surveys

ESDS Government has produced a new guide, The R Guide to ESDS Large-Scale Government Surveys. The aim of this guide is to provide an introduction to analysing large scale government surveys with the help of the R statistical software package. This document is targeted at two categories of users:

1. Those outside higher education, or who do not have access to one of the commonly used statistical packages such as Stata, SPSS or SAS (as R is free of charge) but who would like to conduct their own analysis beyond what is usually published by data producers such as the Office for National Statistics (for example statistics for specific groups of the population).

2. More advanced users who are already familiar with one of the aforementioned packages but would like to learn how to carry out their analyses in R. The guide, therefore, focuses on providing step-by-step examples of common operations most users carry out in the course of their research: how to open data sets, do basic data manipulation operations, produce simple descriptive statistics or weighted contingency tables. This is meant to provide the first category of users with a range of procedures that will help them produce straightforward and robust analyses tailored to their needs without spending too much time on learning the inner workings of R. The second category of users will find a number of familiar operations from which they will be able to further expand their R skills.

It should be noted however that this guide is not an introduction to R. Beginners should use it in conjunction with one of the more comprehensive guides available online. Links and information about R resources are available at the end of the guide, which is available from http://www.esds.ac.uk/government/resources/analysis/

Call for Papers: European LFS/SILC User Conference

European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)

DwB partner GESIS, in cooperation with Eurostat, is organising its European User Conference in Mannheim, Germany, on 21 and 22 March 2013.

Researchers of all disciplines (e.g. economics, demography, geography, political science, public health, and sociology) who use either EU-LFS or EU-SILC microdata are invited to participate and to submit an abstract through the e-form available at: http://www.gesis.org/en/events/conferences/european-user-conference-3/submission-form/.

Substantive topics may include, among others, all aspects of the European labour market, living conditions, migration, income inequalities, poverty and social exclusion. Methodological topics may include e.g. questions of data quality, cross-national and inter-temporal comparability, and statistical modeling. All presentations must be comparative and include data from at least two countries.

Abstracts should not be longer than 1000 words. The abstract should be informative, clearly state the research question, indicate the dataset(s) used and the countries analyzed. The submitters will be notified by 15 January 2013, whether their paper is accepted for presentation or not.


Deadline for submission of abstracts (1000 words maximum): 31 October 2012

Conference webpage: http://www.gesis.org/en/events/conferences/european-user-conference-3/

Announcement of the European User Conference (pdf, 203 Ko): http://dwbproject.org/export/sites/default/events/doc/cfp_eu-user_conference_2013.pdf

Contact people: christof.wolf@gesis.org or Heike.Wirth@gesis.org

Further details: http://dwbproject.org/events/users_conf1.html