Opinions and Lifestyle Survey User Meeting - Call for Papers

ESDS Government is organising an Opinions and Lifestyle User Meeting for Wednesday 21 March 2012 at the Royal Statistical Society, London.  

The Opinions and Lifestyle Survey is a new survey that will be created in 2012 as a result of merging the ONS Opinions survey with some of the previous General Lifestyle Survey questions. For more information on this please follow this link: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/consultations/closed-consultations/2011/the-future-of-the-glf-survey/index.html

The User Meeting will provide users will valuable information from ONS on the content and methodology of the new survey. The meeting will also comprise a number of papers from users of the current ONS Opinions Survey and the General Lifestyle Survey. We, therefore, invite offers of presentations from researchers based on the analysis of either the ONS Opinions Survey or the General Lifestyle Survey.

Details of previous user meetings can be found at http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/esds/events/types/user/

Please send your title and abstract, of around 200 words, to gillian.meadows@manchester.ac.uk as soon as possible but by 23 December at the latest.

Update from ONS on the future of the GLF Survey

ONS has recently published a short information note on their progress and intentions regarding the future of the General Lifestyle Survey. The note, called Update to the future of the GLF survey outlines the intention to change the way the General Lifestyle Survey data are collected, seeks to identify the current uses of the survey data, any implications of stopping the survey, and options for alternative information sources.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/consultations/closed-consultations/2011/the-future-of-the-glf-survey/index.html

Change to General Lifestyle Survey - No more health questions

From the Royal Statistical Society website. For more information and links see http://www.rssenews.org.uk/articles/20110929_3

Health Survey for England statistics will be inferior to General Lifestyle Survey says the UK Statistics Authority


The decision by the Health and Social Care Information Centre to cease its contribution towards the costs of the Office of National Statistics' (ONS) General Lifestyle Survey (GLF) and use the Health Survey for England as an alternative survey vehicle "will not produce statistics consistent with those previously available, or to the same quality", the UK Statistics Authority has told Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

In order to reduce expenditure by £300,000, the ONS will remove the questions on health and health determinants from the GLF from October 2011. Consequently, several long standing National Statistics series on smoking, drinking and the use of health services will end.

In its letter of acknowledgement to the Health Secretary (linked from RSS website), the Statistics Authority says it "will assess whatever new statistical series are created" in the place of these series in order to ensure that the standards of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics are met.

The letter explains the Authority's view "that the best way of collecting the statistics is the way in which they have until now been collected, via the GLF. Users of the existing GLF data have previously highlighted the importance of this source, citing its large sample size, the wide variety of variables it offers for explanatory analysis, and the ability to compare data across Great Britain. Although the Health Survey for England includes many of the health related questions from the GLF, it has a substantially smaller sample size, does not allow country level comparisons and does not include such a wide variety of variables for explanatory analysis."