UK Data Service: Teaching with Data

A collection of quantitative methods e-books and accompanying quizzes for direct use in teaching students or for self-study. E-books aim to build skills in quantitative methods and statistical software and use the Living Costs and Food Survey.

The e-books have been developed through a collaboration of the UK Data Service, National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), and the Centre for Multi-Level Modelling at the University of Bristol and were created using the StatJR software based on original outputs from the project Using Statistical E-books to teach undergraduate students quantitative methods and statistical software funded by the British Academy.

These quantitative methods e-books and accompanying quizzes are for direct use in teaching students or for self-study. They aim to build skills in quantitative methods and statistical software and use the Living Costs and Food Survey.

Using SPSS, lecturers and students can utilise both the practical and quiz elements of each e-book topic. Topics include examining variables, correlations, regression and multiple regression.

The e-books have been developed through a collaboration of the UK Data Service, National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), and the Centre for Multi-Level Modelling at the University of Bristol and were created using the StatJR software based on original outputs from the project Using Statistical E-books to teach undergraduate students quantitative methods and statistical software funded by the British Academy.

This resource is a collection of short guides designed to make lesson planning more efficient for those teaching data analysis skills. Drawing on real classroom experiences, each guide includes suggested research questions, dataset and exercises:

• Gender differences in sexual attitudes (PDF) (using the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles).
• Risk factors associated with increased levels of systolic blood pressure (PDF) (using the Health Survey for England).
• The gender gap in life satisfaction (PDF) (using the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey).
• Public confidence in the police (PDF) (using the Crime Survey for England and Wales).

This resource is designed for teachers to get students to think about data and numbers, teach them how to interpret, analyse and visualise data. This will be done by answering questions such as what proportion of the British public opposes capital punishment, how have attitudes about gender roles changed over the last 30 years and how have levels of crime changed in the last few decades. 

This teaching resource provides instructors and students with materials designed to assist in teaching qualitative interviewing.

Interviewing is a frequently used method in social research with its suitability being entirely dependent on the particular research question. Qualitative interviewing is generally distinguished from questionnaire-based interviewing, even if the form of communication, such as face-to face conversation, may be the same.

The resource provides brief summaries of several different interviewing techniques and each summary is accompanied by full transcripts or excerpts and the interview schedule (or guidance notes). It concludes with selected references and practical suggestions for how to use the materials for teaching.

The resource can serve both as an introduction to the Malaise Inventory - an established scale to measure signs of psychological distress - and as an introduction to quantitative analysis using SPSS. The data and resources are aimed for use with undergraduates and postgraduates and are designed to be used with SPSS (the data are also made available in Stata and tabdelimited formats).

This resource includes a guide on how to access data, an introduction to the established set of survey questions that measures psychological distress - the Malaise Inventory - and a number of data analysis exercises using SPSS.

This teaching resource provides instructors and students with materials designed to assist in teaching qualitative methods of data collection.

This resource provides brief summaries of some of the different ways in which researchers can collect qualitative data, including focus groups, diaries, online data collection, and visual methods. Each summary is accompanied by an illustrative data sample from the extensive collections held by the UK Data Archive.

Tutors can use this resource to create an assignment that enable students to learn to engage with a genuine, real-life piece of research. They are asked to complete specific tasks whilst working within word limits. 

This resource provides generic templates for both the tutor's pack and feedback sheets that can be adapted for courses in different sociological thematic areas. These are in MS Word so that they can be adapted as needed.

This resource consists of a series of activities which can be used in the classroom or in self-paced learning. This teaching resource incorporates a selection of qualitative material collected during the course of the Peter Townsend’s 1950s Last Refuge study, which was a major investigation of long-stay institutional care for old people in Britain.

The aims of this resource are to think critically about the original project's methodology and think through what kinds of opportunities and challenges these methods might present for reuse of that data.

The resource includes a range of activities that can be used in the classroom or as self-paced learning activities. 

The aim of the resource is to familiarise both instructors and students with psychosocial methods and show how other researchers have used these approaches empirically and theoretically in their research projects.