British Social Attitudes
Posted by Armando Brito Mendes | Filed under data sets, estatística, materiais ensino
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Inquerito e dados respetivos sobre atitudes sociais no UK
British Social Attitudes 1983 onwards
Cumulative SPSS file
[New page 22 June 2016: last updated 14 Feb 2017]
Cumulative files 1983 onwards
Attempting analyses across waves became increasingly frustrating as I encountered a range of anomalies, incompatibilities and inconsistencies, not to mention universally incomplete and/or incorrect specifications of measurement levels, missing values and value labels. Accordingly I set myself the task of generating a complete cumulative SPSS file containing the data from all waves from 1983 to 2014 (one colleague described this undertaking as Herculean) to provide what will hopefully be a valuable resource for teachers, students and researchers. The 2015 wave was added in January 2017.
Index to UKDS downloads for British Social Attitudes 1983 – 2014 is an Excel file detailing, for each wave 1983 – 2014, year of survey, link to UKDS, download filename, size of file, number of cases, number of variables, number of variables with non-numeric formats and the new working filename assigned to amended files. The amended *.sav files were sent to Natcen for approval and possible deposit with UKDS, but are now superseded.
Non-numeric variables in British Social Attitudes is a step-by-step account of identifying, in each wave, variables with the same name, but different formats. Several of these variables are specified as Strings with widths varying from A4 to A60, but some are in fact numbers. Others are dates or times in DATE or TIME format and one is in COMMA1. These and other factors prevent merging data from different waves using the SPSS command ADD FILES. It’s been quite complex and tedious tracking them all down, but I eventually managed to create cumulative files for 1983 – 1994 and 2011 – 2014. Merging 1995 – 2005 and 2006 – 2009 was more daunting, as several problems remained to be resolved, but I eventually managed to generate a draft cumulative file for the whole series. Much more meticulous and painstaking detective work and editing was required before a beta version was ready for public release.
Cumulative SPSS file 1983 to 2014
This task was completed on 20 June 2016 and the pass-word protected “mother” file (0.99 gb) has now been lodged (via Dropbox) with Natcen and UKDS for approval and distribution. Custom-written Python code, freely and generously supplied by Jon Peck (retired Senior Software Engineer, IBM-SPSS) has saved me weeks if not months of painstaking needle-in-haystack searches. I also wish to thank Dr Chris Stride (Sheffield) who suggested using the sort facility in Excel to separate variable names with single (positive) missing values from those with paired (positive and equivalent negative) missing values.
For sure, some mini-glitches may remain, but to find and resolve these would at this stage be completely uneconomic of my time. However users are warned that, because metadata for repeated variables are taken from the most recent wave, the value labels for categories of some variables differ from those of earlier waves. This is particularly true of ordinal variables for income groups.
Tags: IBM SPSS Statistics, inquéritos
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