Maximising Data Value: Data Use and Re-Use

Proceedings of the 3^rd ASC International Conference on Survey Research Methods

Edited by Raz Khan, Randy Banks, Richard Cornelius, Suzanne Evans, Tony Manners
Paper, x + 183 pages, ISBN: 0 9546748 0 4

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Introduction

This is the third of the ASC's 2 day residential conferences focussing on methodologies in survey computing. These conferences aim to act as a bridge between our 3 day multi-stream international conferences which examine a broad range of issues and challenges, and our 1 day conferences which look at specific tasks or technologies. We felt that in our industry today (and in the world in general) there is pressure to increase efficiency and improve value for money, which leads us to look, where possible, at existing data and not necessarily "re-invent the wheel". We wanted to know what people were doing to make use of data already collected, and how they overcame problems of reconciling data from different sources. Computing facilities are getting more powerful, enabling us to design complex survey instruments and collect and process large volumes of data and we wanted to look at what might be happening at the leading edge. We also considered that respondent co-operation was diminishing, potentially endangering the whole foundation of our work. We wanted to know what steps colleagues are taking to maintain the goodwill of our interviewees in and increasingly "time-poor" society.

This led us to issue our call for papers in 2004, with the aim of exploring survey research methods in the area of data integration: making the most of existing data and metadata by using them as a platform to aid further research, using them for deeper secondary analysis, and combining multiple sources of data.

We assembled a programme committee, joining forces as in our previous methodology conferences, with the Market Research Society (MRS), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). We received 21 abstracts and accepted the papers you find in this volume. They fell neatly into four broad themes, each of which was owned by one of the organisations:

We have four eminent keynote speakers leading these themes:

Karen Dunnell, recently appointed as the National Statistician and Director of ONS, discusses ONS's plans to redesign its continuous household surveys into a single survey. The contributed papers cover aspects of process integration and we are particularly grateful to Allyson Seyb and Philip Cookson who have travelled from New Zealand and Australia respectively to speak to us.

Nicky Best of Imperial College leads the RSS's session and describes the use of Bayesian graphical models to combine multiple data sources. This session includes three papers looking in depth at the application of complex statistical models.

Andrew Westlake of SASC addresses issues of combining data and knowledge in models and illustrates them with experiences from a project looking to model simultaneously all forms of passenger movement in London. The papers in this session look at bringing together disparate data in a variety of ways.

George Terhanian of HI Europe shares his extensive experiences of multi-mode research and data linkage. This session includes papers on disseminating data through web portals and enabling data re-use in the web-enabled world.

These proceedings follow the order of presentation of and within thematic sessions.

The organisers would like to thank all the speakers who have contributed significant amounts of their time in writing their papers and delivering them to this conference. We hope that you will find the event informative and stimulating, and that you will enjoy discussing the proceedings with your colleagues in the industry.

Scientific Programme Committee

Acknowledgements

This conference is the result of a huge team effort by the volunteer scientific programme committee listed above and we thank them all for the extensive time spent in selecting papers and preparing the programme. A special thanks goes to Randy Banks, Richard Cornelius, Suzanne Evans and Tony Manners for the time spent in liaising with keynote speakers, and their thorough reviews of papers in their sessions.

There is a huge administrative effort in organising a conference and we thank Diana and Steve Elder for their work in managing the venue and bookings, Randy Banks for collating, formatting and printing the proceedings, and Hugh Gentleman for his artistry in preparing the publicity.

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