Understanding Society User Support
The User Support Forum is closed for the Christmas period from 1pm on Friday, December 20th and reopens on Thursday, January 2nd. You can post queries to the user forum during this time, but any questions won’t be answered until the office re-opens in January. Seasons greetings to all our data users!
Welcome to the User Support Forum! This is where you can ask questions about Understanding Society and see the questions that other data users have sent to the Study.
To raise a new issue you need to register to use the User Support Forum. Click on the ‘register’ link in the top right corner to create your account.
Use the Issues tab to see the other queries that have been raised. Your question may have been answered already/discussed already, use the search box to take a look.
If you have a suggestion for improving the data, such as creating new derived variables, suggestions for data harmonisation, adding variables linked from external datasets, etc. let us know by creating a new issue and selecting the category "Suggestions for data improvements" .
You can also look at our FAQ section as the question may have already been answered.
We aim to respond to simple queries within 48 hours and more complex issues within 7 working days.
Important! Please do not post any data files as an attachment to your issue as this will void your licence agreement with the UK Data Service.
Other help available to data users¶
User Support provides a range of resources to help you make the best use of Understanding Society.
The User Guide contains information about the Study, such as sample and questionnaire design, data collection and data processing, and information about using the dataset for research. The User Guide has links to training videos and webinars to help you make the best use of these data.
Online training courses using Stata, SPSS, SAS and R
Call to join our Data User Group
We're looking for experienced users of our data to join our new group and provide a user's perspective on datasets before they are released.
Selecting weights in understanding Society
New code creator
Use our new code creator to extract data from the main Understanding Society dataset.
To help users get started with their research we've built a code creator as part of the variable search area on our website. Select and save variables from the Main Study to produce Stata code that generates a simple flat data file. To use the Code Creator first download Understanding Society SN6614 from the UK Data Service. Read how the Code Creator works