New NZSSN website launched

Our associate, the New Zealand Social Statistics Network, has just launched a new-look website - check it out, along with the new short course offerings for February 2011!

NZSSN courses for 2011

Our affiliated New Zealand Social Statistics Network is preparing the next set of short courses, for February 2011.
The NZSSN website is in the process of an overhaul; for the moment descriptions of previous courses are available here.

The intention is to begin advertising next year's programme around the end of August. Email courses [at] nzssn [dot] org [dot] nz to be notified of further updates.

MoRST Data Matters event

NZSSDS administration attended this event, 15 July 2010. The line up went like this.

Much worthwhile discussion was engaged in around the management and preservation of data. Presentations will soon be available from the MoRST website; find ours also here, now.

NZSSDS to be used in teaching in 2010

Several courses at The University of Auckland, in Sociology, Social Science Research Methods and Statistics, will be taught using data sets held here on the New Zealand Social Science Data Service this year.

In future years we plan to add value to NZSSDS in ways that specifically accommodate use for teaching purposes, including the production of sample coursebooks focusing on some of the data sets held, and data subsets to reduce the burden on students.

New Data Sets Uploaded

In the biggest holdings update to date, we have just added 17 New Zealand data sets from the International Social Survey Programme to our data archive. There is one data set for each year from 1991 to 2007, covering a large range of topic areas. Browse the archive for more details!

New logo for IASSIST

NZSSDS - enhanced publications & teaching materials presentation

Alex Marks, who just finished work as a summer student adding value to research resources here at NZSSDS, presented on the latest additions on Friday, 18 March 2011. Check out his presentation slides.

NZSSDS - teaching again in 2011

Metadata and data sets from the archive are being used once again in University of Auckland teaching this year. The first semester brings postgraduate sociology students learning advanced research skills, and performing some secondary data analysis on ISSP data sets using SPSS! Please take a look at the results of this same exercise from last year!

Summer students add value to NZSSDS

The COMPASS Research Centre is currently hosting students working over the summer to add value to the data archive holdings of NZSSDS.

Published journal articles associated with survey data sets are the focus, and we are intending to make these resources, and associated SAS program code, available in the WebView interface in due course.

TASA/SAANZ Conference Sessions

We have put in for a 2-hour spot in the TASA/SAANZ conference, 4–7 December 2007. This will be 10:30am - 12:30pm, Wednesday 5 December, and will entail a presentation introducing NZSSDS and international goings-on in data archiving, and a hands-on session in a computer lab, offering a walkthrough of the Nesstar WebView interface and our data holdings. We are also generally interested in offering demonstrations to interested parties - contact us to express such interest!

Website progress

This NZSSDS site is getting up and running. 15 sets of data and metadata are available for browsing; online analysis and download will be available soon with registration details, please bear with us.

COMPASS notification

The group in which NZSSDS is administered has now become a Faculty Research Centre within The University of Auckland: Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences. Visit the COMPASS website for more information.

Data access / deposit forms online

We have uploaded forms for users to fill in in order to download data sets, and also a lot of information for potential data depositors to NZSSDS. See the Accessing Data and Depositing Data pages for more information.

Data service registration up

If you follow the link to the accessing data page, you can read more about the benefits of registering, and how to!