Understanding Society User Support

Looking at an earlier support question - is this down to a large change in the volumes of respondents who have a CSA type child maintenance arrangement rather than a voluntary one?

Thank you, this doesn't really help the situation though. I had looked at cseeterm2 and it has even more missings and I cannot produce my statistic with it when well over half of responses for my sample are a -8 or -9. I need clarification as to whether this is the way it will be going forward as I produce an Official Statistic using it so it's a bit of a worry there being such a change - is this saying it was wrong before?

Dear Laura,

As respondents were asked either one or the other, you can combine the responses from both questions. If you do this there are only 6 missing responses. However, there are two things to be careful about: first, the response options seem to have changed and i_cseeterm2 has codes 8 and 9 ("several times a week" and "once or twice a week") which are replacing code 2 in i_cseeterm ("at least once per week").

The second is that the group of people who have been asked this question at Wave 9 is not the same group as in previous waves due to the looping working differently. We are currently working on resolving this issue and will get back to you as soon as possible.

Best wishes,
Stephanie

Dear Laura,

I have some updated information about i_cseeterm and i_cseeterm2: this was not due to a script error, but because we decided that the response options needed to be changed. From Wave 11 onwards, only cseeterm2 will be asked, and as I said previously, if you would like to use them together you will need to combine codes 8 and 9 ("several times a week" and "once or twice a week") in i_cseeterm2 to be equivalent to code 2 in i_cseeterm ("at least once per week").

I will follow up with information about the looping shortly.

Best wishes,
Stephanie

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for this. I'm less concerned with the change in options and more the change in looping. That said, will the response options continue to be numbered in the odd way they are for wave 9? The 8 and 9 in the middle of the run, whilst I can see why it has been done, is a bit odd.

I'm in touch with other members of the USoc team separately about the looping issue so hopefully we can resolve it for some future waves.

thanks,
Laura

Dear Stephanie,

I have a tangentially related question. We have used the seeterm variable as a proxy for relationship quality with the ex-partner. This was because the relex variable has quite a high proportion of unusable responses. Do you have any thoughts on what the 'inapplicable' responses mean in this case? they make up over a quarter of all responses.

Many thanks,
Laura

Dear Laura,

The inapplicable responses in relex are due to this question being asked only once per ex partner, while the observations in the dataset are for each child.

Best wishes,
Stephanie

Dear Laura,

The 8 and 9 codes for cseeterm2 will remain the same as in Wave 9 to avoid confusion when merging waves. The participants won't see those numbers, they are just for use in the data. The variables will also keep the '2' suffix to be clear that the question is not exactly the same as cseeterm.

Best wishes,
Stephanie

Thank you Stephanie, that's good to be aware of on the seeterm variables. And thank you for the information on relex.