Teaching
Iain Brennan teaches Quantitative Data Analysis to postgraduates at the University of Hull using the UK Data Service’s British Crime Survey (BCS), among other datasets. Because his class has a general focus for use by a number of different degrees and skill levels, he feels the broadness and variety of the BCS as well as it’s relatively ease to parse topics make it an ideal teaching dataset.
Brennan uses different subsets of the BCS to teach a variety of analytical concepts and techniques and he supplements the survey with some self-created data. He then releases the entire dataset to students for the assessment, which involves them identifying different types of variables and drawing relationships between them using the statistical techniques taught in the lectures.
He feels the BCS is particularly useful for its variety of different measurement levels, including an abundance of ordinal and categorical variables. Brennan says students are always surprised to find that they have access to this and other comprehensive public datasets through the UK Data Service. He also feels that the BCS is a good introductory dataset, particularly for students in disciplines that are not traditionally quantitatively focused. He finds that after dealing with the BCS in his class, students are less scared of large datasets and more enthusiastic about the variety of data available.
Brennan will continue teaching this course in the coming academic year and will also be expanding the data use to an undergraduate class as well.