Looking for new datasets for teaching? The UK Data Service offers new teaching datasets from major UK Surveys. Each dataset is designed to make teaching with data easier by making teaching data both accessible and engaging.
National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, 2010-2012
The British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) are some of the largest and most detailed studies of sexual attitudes and behaviour in the world. Natsal-3 interviewed 15,162 adults aged 16-74 in 2010-2012. With input from the Natsal Team at UCL, we have created two new teaching datasets based on this amazing data.
Teaching Dataset
The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, 2010-2012: Teaching Dataset includes data from the full sample in the original study; but to make the data more accessible for teaching we have reduced the number of variables, created a student-friendly user guide, set missing values and added a new continuous measure of sexual attitudes.
Natsal offers a great resource to engage students in quantitative data analysis. Questions and topics to explore with the data include:
- How do attitudes towards sexual lifestyles vary?
- The role of family background on behaviour and attitudes.
- What determines age of having children?
- Differences in sex education.
- Who takes what drugs?
- What are the most popular forms of contraception?
- How does religion determine sexual attitudes and behaviours?
We have put together some brief instructor notes with ideas for teaching different topics and methods.
Open Access Teaching Dataset
Designed to be easy to use and easy to access, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, 2010-2012: Open Access Teaching Dataset includes 20 variables and a subset of cases. The dataset is accessible for teaching via an open data licence, which means instructors and learners do not need to register with the UK Data Service. Topics in the data include:
- attitudes towards sexual lifestyles and behaviours such as adultery, same sex relationships, and sex in the media
- health/mental health and disability
- religion and religious beliefs
- demographic attributes including relationship status.
Other teaching datasets from recent UK surveys
Last year we updated our most popular teaching datasets with more recent data. In our collection, you can now find the following:
English Housing Survey, 2018-2019: Household Data Teaching Dataset
A household level dataset with 32 variables covering demographic details, housing characteristics and household characteristics.
Quarterly Labour Force Survey, July – September 2018: Teaching Dataset
Individual level data for respondents aged 16 to 65 years. The dataset includes 53 variables covering socio-demographics, employment, housing tenure, education, and health.
Crime Survey for England and Wales, 2017-2018: Teaching Dataset
A dataset with 114 variables covering demographic details, perceptions of crime. We have increased the number of continuous variables by deriving new variables with factor scores relating to worry about crime, effectiveness and fairness of Criminal Justice System and confidence in police.