Accelerating wellbeing data analysis

Our role is to support the research community in measuring wellbeing openly, iteratively, robustly and in an accessible way. To help achieve this we have published free-to-use code for data cleaning.

The purpose of the initiative is to:

1. make our own methods visible and transparent, which offers opportunity for quality review and makes research more robust
2. make wellbeing data more accessible by reducing resource barriers
3. create a way to track and understand what researchers are working on, which will feed into future reviews and help inform policymaking

Understanding levels of wellbeing in society

Datasets collected through wellbeing surveys provide a wealth of knowledge about how the UK population’s wellbeing has changed and been impacted over time. This includes insights into how big moments such as hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the pandemic and in recent months the cost of living crisis, impact wellbeing.

However there is still so much we do not yet know about how to improve wellbeing. Or how wellbeing levels change for and affect different groups of people.

Accelerating access to wellbeing datasets

Part of the solution is for more researchers to get involved in using existing wellbeing data. But data cleaning is resource hungry and the ‘cost of entry’ is high. One way to make data more accessible is to make the process more efficient.

Our wellbeing data cleaning code can be used to extract and clean wellbeing data from specific datasets, making it easier and more time-efficient to work with. This could potentially save hours of work, which in turn means the quality of work goes up, and the costs of grants go down.

How does this work in practice?

The initiative is a public good and available for free on Github. 

Researchers can download a specific code from one of the repositories on our data usage library page, import it in their Stata software package and run it on the data, making it ready for analysis. 

The code can also act as a guide to analyse other datasets with similar  data, or be adapted to extract a different set of variables within the same data set. 

All the code is available for free, but we ask that if you make use of one, you cite the technical report accompanying it. Doing this means that we’ll be able to see who’s doing wellbeing research with this data, and we’ll be able to ensure that your work feeds into our future reviews and policy recommendations.

Who is it for?

• Seasoned wellbeing researchers and economists.
• Organisations that use wellbeing data for research-purposes.
• Wellbeing-curious researchers to more easily access and use the data.

How the Centre is using the initiative

We have already developed codes to explore wellbeing data from the Civil Service People survey, Annual Population Survey and click-and-drag diary instrument (CaDDI).

See the ‘In this project’ section below for further details.

> Download codes from our wellbeing data usage library.

Further projects using this tool will be shared in our weekly newsletter and added to the ‘In this project’ section below.