Teaching
Sean Clouston, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, used the UK Data Service-hosted English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) as a part of a week-long course on comparative and longitudinal analysis for Ph.D. students and accomplished researchers from throughout Canada. The ‘Statistical Methods in Aging’ conference presented a variety of analytical techniques to participants interested in both the subject of aging and the broader subject of doing analysis on longitudinal and international data.
“Not a lot of people trained to do this analysis in Canada, so the idea of the conference was building capacity, building knowledge of the data and what you can do with it,” says Clouston. He says the idea for the conference sprung from his experience with a variety of international datasets and the realisation that much of the research he was seeing produced was regionally based. “My feeling was most of these people had done statistical research and a few had done longitudinal research but most had not dealt with it in detail or in complex methods,” he notes.
Paired with the newest release of a similar Canadian dataset, the ELSA was able to provide a window into how longitudinal datasets can be used as the base of a wide variety of research into economic and health outcomes. The data were also used in the more methodologically focused sessions, where course attendees could explore a specially prepared version of the ELSA to test mixed methods and other advanced analytical techniques.
To Clouston, the course was as much about promoting the global availability of these datasets as teaching the methods, since the attendees were a diverse group who had varying levels of experience with longitudinal study. There was an overall positive response, whether from Ph.D. students learning new analytical techniques or more experienced researchers being exposed to datasets they did not know were available or that they had access to. Beyond the ELSA, the conference highlighted the UK Data Service as the place to go for in-depth British social science data.
Though he is not sure when the next edition of the course will be, Clouston feels the increasing call for experience with longitudinal and comparative skills will be important for researchers in Canada looking to secure grant funding, and expects there will be subsequent editions in the future. “It’s something that people are going to need,” he says.