UK Alcohol Data Map : Introduction
This ‘data map’ is a first attempt to map out all the publicly available data on alcohol in the UK. We first thought of creating a resource of this kind when we discovered just how much data exists covering a multitude of research questions – and how little of it has been used by alcohol researchers to date. We guessed that this is because trawling through obscure surveys in the hope of the perfect question is both time consuming and ultimately an unenjoyable task.
This resource therefore allows researchers to quickly find the right data for their work. You can search for datasets that satisfy a wide variety of characteristics at the same time, including:
- Alcohol questions (e.g. binge-drinking, parental attitudes to alcohol)
- Other topics (e.g. perpetrating crime, sexual behaviour, smoking)
- Type of survey (e.g. longitudinal data, among children, sample size, geographical data).
This has only been possible thanks to a small grant from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for the original paper-based resource, and the existing ESRC-funded resources of the Question Bank (http://qb.soc.surrey.ac.uk/) and Data Archive (http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/).
We hope that that this resource will help unlock some hitherto under-utilised data for your work. Finally, if you have any suggestions for improvements for possible future versions (or spot any errors that we have missed), then please contact us to enable us to improve future versions for all users – we intend this to be a continuously updated resource, and your help will be invaluable in this.
Please click here (pdf 121k) for a short guide to using the Data Map, or simply click here to go straight to the search page.
Ben Baumberg, Russell Bennetts and Rachel Seabrook, 2008