All of the statistical analyses on this site will use data from two real, publicly available datasets. The first is the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2011-2012. This survey is also sometimes referred to as the CSEW. The second is the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, 2004-2007, also called the YCS.
Here, you’ll learn more about our datasets and how to access and download them from the UK Data Service, an ESRC-funded website that allows researchers access to a wide range of different datasets. (The PDF on the right side of this page includes screenshots of this process and is worth downloading!)
We believe that the best way to learn how to do research is by using real datasets – not sanitised versions of data that you will never come across again if you develop your quantitative skills. Data is messy, with missing data, strange combinations of answers, and relationships that you don’t expect. This can confuse easily, so using unchanged data from the start will help you understand what to do when you move on to your own research.
Previously known as the British Crime Survey, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (or CSEW) has been reporting on individual and household perceptions and experiences of crime since 1981. Prior to 2001, the survey was biennial. In the years since 2001, the survey has been conducted all year round. Although the survey cycles and study name have changed, the format of the survey has remained the same since its inception. Respondents are first asked to complete a non-victim questionnaire concerning their experiences with crime in the 12 months previous to their participation in the survey. This questionnaire includes topics such as performance of the criminal justice system, plastic card fraud, mass-marketing fraud, perceptions of crime, mobile and bicycle crime, demographics and media, and anti-social behaviour.
In addition, the respondents are randomly assigned to one of four additional survey modules, in which they are asked questions specific to each module:
Module A: experiences of the police
Module B: attitudes to the criminal justice system
Module C: crime prevention and security
Module D: ad-hoc crime topics
If a respondent has been the victim of crime, they are also asked to complete a victim questionnaire covering the emotional, social, and financial consequences of their experience.
At the beginning of 2009, general non-victim and specific victim questionnaires for children ages 10-15 were introduced.
The Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales (or YCS) began in 1985, using survey questionnaires to collect information about the educational goals and achievements of young people both during and after secondary school. The young people surveyed are drawn from schools all over England and Wales, and are selected for the YCS when they are 16 years old in Year 11. The data in the YCS is collected once a year, with answers from each year’s questionnaire stored as a “sweep,” so that all the information from the first year of a cohort is labelled “Sweep 1,” information from the second year is “Sweep 2,” and so on.
The YCS is broken up into cohorts based on what year the young people started participating in the study. The YCS dataset we’ll be using is from Cohort 12, which began in 2004. This dataset contains variables from the first four sweeps of the survey, and follows the young people from age 16 to age 20.
The UK Data Service provides researchers online access to many large-scale social surveys, allowing the investigation of various dimensions of social life in the UK. Fortunately, both the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2011-2012 and the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, 2004-2007 are among the social surveys available for download from the UK Data Service website. Dataset download from the UK Data Service is absolutely free. The only thing you must do in order to gain access to these datasets is create an account and register your research with the UK Data Service.
To begin, go to www.ukdataservice.ac.uk, and select Register on the upper right of the screen.
Next, click Login to the UK Data Service.
You’ll be prompted to enter the organization through which you’d like to gain access to the data. This is very often a college or university. Enter the organization and click Continue.
You will be prompted to enter your university or college username and password. (If you’re not affiliated with a university and do not have an approved institutional login, you can apply for a UK Data Archive username here: http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/sign-up/credentials-application).
Next, just complete the registration form, including the acceptance of terms. You will receive an email confirmation of your registration, which includes a link you’ll need to follow to fully complete registration.
Once you’ve received the confirmation email and followed the link to complete your registration, you can immediately search for and download new datasets. Now you can access the CSEW and YCS and download the data for your research. Go to http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk, and enter Crime Survey for England and Wales 2011-2012 (or Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, 2004-2007) into the search bar.
Because the CSEW is a survey split into several different modules across two age groups (children ages 10-15 and adults ages 16 and older), there are several different CSEW datasets available for download. Some of these are comprehensive, spanning years of survey data. Other sets are Teaching Datasets – these have been modified by different people for the purposes of their own teaching. However, because it is useful to start from scratch with the full dataset and as it’s beneficial to modify the data to suit your own research question, it’s helpful to download the full dataset. The one we will be using for our analyses here is SN 7252 Crime Survey for England and Wales 2011-2012, which includes all information collected across all questionnaires and the four specific modules. The YCS dataset we’ll be using is SN 5830 Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales. In order to follow along with the analyses we perform in each section, make sure you select the correct datasets!
Once you’ve found the dataset you want to use, click on the Download/Order link under the name of the dataset. Before you can download, you’ll need to register a new use of data. Clicking this link will take you to a registration form, where you’ll enter the intended use of the data (in our case, non-commercial), a usage title such as “Quantitative Methods Online Tutorial,” and a brief, 30-word description of the data usage. An example description is: "This dataset will be used for personal learning purposes in conjunction with a quantitative methods tutorial website. The data will be used to practice and explore common statistical analyses in SPSS."
When the form is complete, click Go at the bottom of the page. Now, you’ll be able to see your data usage registrations. Click on the title of your data usage registration (in this case: “Quantitative Methods Online Tutorial,” or whatever you have chosen to call your registration). This should take you to the download screen, where you’ll be able to download your dataset.
Once you have accepted the conditions of use, you will be provided with a list of several formats in which the data is available. The examples on this site will be done using SPSS, so if you’re planning on using the data you download to follow the tutorials provided here, click on SPSS to begin downloading the data in the right format.
Click Save, making sure to save the data files in an easily accessible location.
You are now registered with the UK Data Service, and have downloaded your dataset!
In addition, at the end of the form, you’ll need to select the categories that best fit your research project. Suppose you were doing university research into the impact of neighbourhood policing on the perception of crime. You could select categories like “General,” and “Research” under the Education tab, “Crime and law enforcement” under the Law, crime and legal system tab, and “Population studies” under the Population, vital statistics and censuses tab.
Select Download and then I accept to accept the licence agreement.
The data should be downloaded to your desktop in a zip folder.
Suppose you have just downloaded the CSEW data files. In order to access these datasets, click to open the CSEW 2011-2012.zip folder on your desktop. Click to open the UKDA-7252-spss folder, the spss folder, and then the spss14 folder. You should now see the four CSEW data files.
For the CSEW specifically, the four data files available in the download represent the non-victim and victim questionnaire answers of both adult and child respondents. For our purposes on this site, our focus is on adult experience of police, so the only dataset file we’ll be working with is csew_apr11mar12_nvf.sav, which is the dataset representing the adult non-victim questionnaire data. If you were interested in investigating the crime experienced by children ages 10 to 15, you could use the data file csew_apr11mar12_10-15_vf.sav, which records the answers to victim questionnaires for respondents between the ages of 10 and 15.
In this document, you can explore the structure of the CSEW questionnaire and see exactly which questions were asked of the respondents in each of the four follow-up modules. It’s easy to use the survey questionnaire to find out detailed information about variables you are interested in using. Just use the search bar at the top of questionnaire document to search for key words or variable names. These searches can tell you things like which respondents answered what questions or how many variables are suitable to your research.
When you download the CSEW and YCS from the UK Data Service, in addition to the datasets, you will also have downloaded copies of the questionnaires used in the surveys. These survey documents can be extremely helpful when outlining an area of research, because they provide you with the structure of the survey itself and allow you to see which respondents were asked which questions. Let’s find the adult non-victim questionnaire.
For the CSEW, the survey questionnaires can be found by selecting UKDA-7252-spss in the CSEW 2011-2012.zip folder. Next, click on the mrdoc folder, and select pdf. Here, you’ll see five PDF files, including the dataset user guide and survey questionnaire for the youth aged 10-15 survey, Volume One of the CSEW 2011-2012 Technical Report, and the dataset user guide and survey questionnaire for the adult survey. Click on 7252_csew_2011-12_adult_questionnaire.pdf. This will open the CSEW 2011-2012 Adults (Aged 16 and Over) Questionnaire.
This information is important because it can help shape which variables we select when we begin analysing our data. The CSEW dataset contains responses from over 46,000 participants and includes 2324 variables, which is quite a lot of data (probably more than you have experienced before). Fortunately, this amount of data only looks overwhelming. Once you have formulated a research question and have directed your investigation, you can focus on only the data on variables that concern your research. We know we are interested in respondent experience of police, so when we start analysing the data, we know where to direct our attention.
Each section of this site will begin with a focused research question that draws from data either in the CSEW or YCS. Each research question we construct will inform which dataset we use and what statistical analyses we perform.
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