Understanding Society User Support: Issueshttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/support/favicon.ico?15995719382024-01-18T13:10:31ZUnderstanding Society User Support
Redmine Support #2032 (Resolved): hidp missing from hhresp but present in income, egoalt, indresp fileshttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/20322024-01-18T13:10:31ZChris Grollman
<p>Hi there,</p>
<p>I am taking values of <em>ficode</em> from the <strong>income</strong> file, and want to attach them to the associated household file <strong>hhresp</strong> using a join by <em>hidp</em>.</p>
<p>Across waves f to l I have 4111 unique values of <em>hidp</em> from the <strong>income</strong> file. When I link to <strong>hhresp</strong> using <em>hidp</em> I find that 119/4111 (2.9%) do not link: that is, the <em>hidp</em> in <strong>income</strong> doesn't occur in the <strong>hhresp</strong> file. The proportion where the <em>hidp</em> is not present in <strong>hhresp</strong> varies across the seven waves I am looking at.</p>
<p>I have looked in detail for one <em>hidp</em> in wave j. That <em>hidp</em> occurs in the <strong>income</strong>, <strong>egoalt</strong> and <strong>indresp</strong> files, with a total of four <em>pidps</em> living at that household. But the <em>hidp</em> doesn't appear in <strong>hhresp</strong>.</p>
<p>What is going on?!</p>
<p>Thank you!<br />Chris</p> Support #2006 (Resolved): Longitudinal analysis using calendar year?https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/20062023-12-12T13:52:21ZMarina Kousta
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I am reaching out to kindly request help on how to conduct longitudinal analysis using calendar year datasets.<br />1) Although online you state the published calendar year data are meant to be used for cross-sectional analysis, does that also stand for when we create our own calendar year datasets? Or is it meant to be a guidance only for when you release the pre-made calendar year data? If that is the case regardless, is there some way for us to still conduct longitudinal analysis after creating our own calendar year data?<br />2) Although you recommend using the w_month (sample month) to create calendar year data, would it still be ok to instead use the interview date instead, when the exact date is of great importance to the research question itself (i.e. when testing the introduction or removal of a social policy).</p>
<p>Many thanks in advance for your time and consideration.</p>
<p>Best wishes,<br />Marina</p> Support #1999 (Resolved): treatment of HMOshttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/19992023-12-05T14:30:43ZMarika Cioffi
<p>Hi, I am interested in how USOC treats full-time students and HMOs in terms of households composition. More specifically,<br />Are full-time students living alone or with other people (not family) considered as being one-person households or are they part of the household of their parents?<br />Are they the “reference person” of their own household or are they just a member of the household where one of their parents is the reference person?</p> Support #1945 (Resolved): Using the individual questionnairehttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/19452023-08-01T12:11:05ZJoshua Parry
<p>When doing analysis at the individual level. Is it valid to do research using multiple members of the same household or would you just one person within each household.. For instance, if i was trying to assess the prevalence of volunteering in individuals. Would you use one individual response per household or the response of all individuals from each household?</p> Support #1770 (Resolved): Making best use of the Ethnic Minority Boost Samplehttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/17702022-10-02T14:18:46ZLaurence Rowley-Abel
<p>Hi Understanding Society team,<br />I am conducting a basic analysis of health outcomes across combinations of ethnic groups and age groups using the Wave 10 data. My issue is that when I produce things like cross-tabulations, once I apply weights, and break down the sample by both broad ethnic group and age group, I end up with a small N in many cells (ie: < 10) and in some cases 0 counts for a cell and so I am ending up with very large confidence intervals. Having read the general User Guide and the Ethnicity and Immigration User Guide, my understanding is that one of the reasons the ethnic minority boost samples were included was to try to tackle this issue of small sample sizes in marginalised subgroups, so I wanted to check that I am not missing something. I think my main issue is that once I apply a weight (such as j_indinui_xw), the N for the ethnic minorities is being scaled down in order account for the oversampling of these groups, and since the weighted N (rather than the unweighted N) is being used to calculate confidence intervals by R, I end up with very large confidence intervals.</p>
<p>As a quick illustration: I'm using the j_indresp.dta file and have recoded the j_ethn_dv variable into Asian, Black, Other, White. In the Black category, there are 1314 respondents, but when I apply the weight j_indinui_xw and tabulate by ethnicity using the svytable function in R, this is scaled down to only 458.3841. If I then break this down by 10-year age group and my health outcome variable, I end up with very small Ns (or zeros) which means when using a function such as svyciprop in R, I get very large confidence intervals.</p>
<p>This may simply be an unavoidable problem, but given that Understanding Society has put lots of effort into including these extra ethnic minority samples, I wanted to make sure I was making best use of them. And just to double check - I can simply use the normal indresp file in order to draw on this ethnic minority boost sample?</p>
<p>Many thanks for your help and the amazing resources you provide!</p>
<p>Best wishes,<br />Laurence Rowley-Abel</p> Support #1731 (Resolved): Interview Time for Main Survey Wave 10https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/17312022-07-22T10:51:56ZClaire Wu
<p>Dear support team,</p>
<p>I am conducting a study comparing the timing of housework before and after the Covid-19 outbreak, and I intend to run two separate models for these two points in time. For the data prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, I intend to choose wave 10 of the main survey. However, I am confused about the timing of the fieldwork for wave 10 - does it end before the Covid-19 outbreak or until May 2021? I checked the survey timeline webpage: <a class="external" href="https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/survey-timeline">https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/survey-timeline</a> which shows wave 10 between January 2018 and May 2020, but when I check the user guide it seems it already ends in 2019?</p>
<p>Could someone please help me with this? Any comments would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>Claire</p> Support #1629 (Resolved): Merging Variable vote_7https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/16292022-01-13T16:30:31ZJan Heinicke
<p>Dear Madame or Sir,</p>
<p>i am a stundent and am using the bhps and ukhls datasets in a project.</p>
<p>I have a question concerning the merge of the waves of the BHPS and the UKHLS.<br />We are using the Code that is shared online public to merge the datasets across waves and wanted to use the vote_7<br />variable for our analysis.<br />But when we used the loop that is included in the merge, the resulting variable vote_7 has a category 7 in wave 7 of BHPS with 700 observations and there is the info of a subsample which we can not find in the data.<br />Also, the merge led to 0 observations in wave 8 of the BHPS, but we can not identify the error for that.<br />Could you maybe tell us how to solve that problem or how to handle it?</p>
<p>THank you for your time and help.</p>
<p>Best wishes,</p>
<p>Jan</p> Support #1617 (Resolved): Rare cases of time varying psu and stratahttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/16172021-12-08T13:34:46ZLucas Auer
<p>Dear support team,<br />When trying to account for the complex survey design, I have run into the following stata error message: "panels are not nested within clusters". In trying to find the cause of the problem, I have noticed that there is one instance in indresp where psu/strata switch from 3924/2962 in wave 7 to 120/30 in wave 8 onwards, and one instance where psu/strata switch from 2918/2459 in wave 7 to 132/34 in wave 8 onwards. As I have read that with regards to "the strata and psu variables (...), as these are sample design variables, their values do not change across the waves for any person" (Introduction to Understanding Society using Stata, Example 6), this surprised me. Any clarification on why this is the case and how I should deal with it would be greatly appreciated.<br />Many thanks,<br />Lucas</p>
<p>PS: The stata code I used to examine the relevant psu/strata is as follows: <br />by pidp (psu), sort: gen byte moved = (psu<sup><a href="#fn1">1</a></sup> != psu[_N])<br />browse if moved</p> Support #1557 (Resolved): Survey design https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/15572021-06-24T02:10:30ZIris Wang1585844674@qq.com
<p>Dear staff,</p>
<p>I am really interested in survey design of Understanding Society. I notice that the survey is conducted annually with a 2-year span, and the sample is allocated to monthly batches. I know it must take great efforts to conduct annual survey with such a large sample. So I am wondering is there any detailed and systematic explanation on why it is designed in this way?Are there any pros and cons (including for fieldwork, survey result, data collection etc) for such design?</p>
<p>Your early reply would be much appreciated. Thank you!</p>
<p>Best,<br />Iris</p> Support #1391 (Resolved): dropouts due to mental health https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/13912020-08-04T10:46:50ZKai Miele
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>i was wondering whether there is any particular incentive for previous respondents to attend to upcoming interviews. <br />I'm concerned that a decline in participants' mental health could lead to a decreased willingness to continiue upcoming interviews and thereby a downward biased mental health indicator.</p>
<p>If so, do you have any idea on how to compensate for that?</p>
<p>Many thanks,<br />Kai</p> Support #1378 (Resolved): Overlapping interview periods across waves?https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/13782020-07-15T12:28:44ZAbigail Dumalus
<p>Hello Alita,</p>
<p>I noticed from browsing the dataset that wave periods from wave 2 until wave 9 have been overlapping. My basis for this observation are the following variables: istrtdaty, istrtdatm, istrtdatd, and wave. To illustrate, let me focus on waves 22 and 23:</p>
<p>- wave 22 (UKHLS wave 5) starts 9 January 2013 [11 interviews] until 29 April 2014 [1 interview]<br />- wave 23 (UKHLS wave 6) starts 8 January 2014 [26 interviews] until 11 May 2015 [1interview]</p>
<p>From my perception, interviews done from 8 January 2014 until 29 April 2014 in wave 23 can also be assumed to have happened in the latter portion of wave 22. I am really puzzled because I have set xtreg command with wave as a time variable, but then interview periods appear to overlap into the next wave. I have been searching for fieldwork information per wave to find out about official interview timelines. Can you please clarify where I can confirm actual interview periods per wave, so that I can still use wave as a panel time variable? Would this be an issue as well with how the weighting variables have been constructed?</p> Support #1256 (Resolved): questions re deaths and representativenesshttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/12562019-10-09T09:45:42ZDavid Walsh
<p>Sorry to bug you – especially as, no doubt, this information is available somewhere on your website. In my defence, however, I have just spent quite a lot of time on the website and I have struggled to find it (although that’s probably just my remarkable stupidity). Hence this probably annoying email.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s two very quick questions, both of which I am sure will be quick to answer (not least because as you are probably asked them over and over again..):</p>
<p>1. Is Understanding Society linked to death records? I don’t mean just in terms of being notified that someone has died can no longer be part of the study, I mean in terms of being able to analyses the data, and look at risk factors for death. So, it would need details of deaths (dates etc) to be collected.<br />2. At what geographical level are the data deemed to be broadly representative? Just GB? Or the individual nations (Scotland, England, Wales)? Or anything (local authority? Region?) below that?</p>
<p>Sorry if these are incredibly dull, frequently asked questions which are irritating.</p>
<p>But thanks for your time if you are able to answer them!</p> Support #1089 (Resolved): Does the data collection procedure of US fit the rule of randomization? https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/10892018-11-07T15:11:20ZJing Shenjing.shen@mzes.uni-mannheim.de
<p>I'm conducting a study about the impact of the Brexit Referendum on life satisfaction using a difference-in-difference approach, which requires a random assignment between the control and treated groups. My question is: can we say respondents were not selectively interviewed before and after the Referendum (June 23, 2016); namely, the chance for one to be interviewed before and after a certain date is random? Can we make such an assertion?</p> Support #1003 (Resolved): Id Pnohttps://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/10032018-07-16T18:08:53ZGiorgio Piccittogiorgio.piccitto@unimi.it
<p>Dear Users, <br />I would like to know your advise on how identifying the progressive number of each member of household (and so understanding his\her 'position' within the household).<br />I mean, I understood that the variable <del>pno</del> identifies this, but I did not find its legend (so what 1, 2, 3, ... stand for).</p>
<p>Thanks a lot, best, G.</p> Support #978 (Resolved): different size in "merge" and "previously been interviewed"https://iserredex.essex.ac.uk/support/issues/9782018-05-30T12:42:13ZEduwin Pakpahan
<p>Dear all, <br />I am a new user of understanding society, so pls apologize if my question is quite basic. <br />I am trying to merge the wave1 and wave2 data, i.e. merging "b_indresp.dta" and "a_indresp.dta". Using merge function in stata (the stata code is 'merge 1:1 pidp using ... '), I found 38388 participants were both in wave1 and 2, 162019 were new entrants in wave 2 and 12606 were in wave 1 only. Then I look at those who have been interviewed before, by 'tab b_ff_ivlolw', I found 46164 individual had previously been interviewed. This is bigger than 38388 I obtained beforehand.</p>
<p>Do I miss something here or misunderstood with the b_ff_ivlolw?</p>