Metadata & Data Sets

NZSSDS provides access to data from New Zealand surveys in the social sciences. Full metadata are held in an interface using Nesstar software. Data sets are held in Nesstar's format but can be downloaded in a number of different formats. This 'WebView' interface can be accessed by clicking the browse link at the top right.

Metadata holdings and one-way frequency tables can be viewed freely for all data sets. In order to view crosstabulations or perform basic analyses online, or to download a data set, you will need to register with NZSSDS and then fill in a user undertaking form in order to gain permission to access the specific data set(s) in which you are interested. This additional step is in place so that those that deposit data sets with us always know who is wanting to make use of their data.

Articles & Program Code

Materials have also been put together to support published articles related to some of our data sets and also other projects involving the COMPASS Research Centre. Program code (in SAS) is being made available to allow users to reproduce analyses that were undertaken in the past.

You will find these resources among our data holdings as well, as time permits their development and markup. Many thanks in this regard go to our summer scholars for their work on these materials.

Teaching Data & Materials

NZSSDS has been used in teaching at The University of Auckland, and we promote its use for such purposes in general. One postgraduate course in statistics has made extensive use of survey metadata and our teaching data set for the New Zealand Quality of Healthcare Study, while in sociology, postgraduates have been introduced to analysing social survey data in SPSS, using International Social Survey Programme surveys from NZSSDS.

For more generic teaching/self-learning modules, we have had developed workbooks to support some of our more popular data holdings in introducing basic statistical analysis techniques in SPSS. These are available upon request, and accompany reduced teaching data sets that are freely downloadable from NZSSDS.

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