ONS has been working in collaboration with The Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), who funded the work, to make available Samples of Anonymised Records (SARs) from the 2001 Census for research purposes.
The first of these samples, the Individual SAR (Licensed) is available from CCSR (a charge may apply). The file is suitable for use with statistical software packages such as SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and STATA (Statistical Software for Professionals). To register for access and for further information on guidance and training, please go to www.ccsr.ac.uk/sars/ and follow the link for access and registration.
The dataset contains a 3 percent sample, which relates to some 1.76 million records, of responses from the 2001 Census. These data have been completely anonymised so that no individuals from the census can be identified. The geography available for this dataset is Government Office Region (in England).
The following information is given for each individual:
main demographic (e.g. sex/age/marital status), health and socio-economic variables;
derived variables, e.g. social class; accommodation (e.g. tenure and availability of amenities/car);
information about the sex, economic position and social class of the individual's family head; and
limited information about other members of the individual's household (e.g. the number of pensioners);
The first version of the Individual SAR (Licensed) was made available in October 2004. This has been superseded by a second version which is an extended dataset and is now available from CCSR. The second version is the official version and contains more detailed information. Some of the main changes are the inclusion of a religion variable for England and Wales and Scotland; an increase from 5 ethnic group categories to 16 for England and Wales, 14 for Scotland and 11 for Northern Ireland; an increase from 7 country of birth categories to 16; and an increase from 25 to 81 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC 2000) occupation categories.
Users will be able to register for access by going to the CCSR website above and following the link for access and registration. If users have downloaded version one of the Individual SAR then they will be required to delete version one before accessing version two.
It is intended to provide a 5 per cent sample of Small Area Microdata (SAM) a new product - containing 2.9 million individual records with Local Authority level identified. The variables included will be similar to those in the Individual SAR (Licensed), though broader banding will be used to preserve individuals confidentiality. This is expected to be available in August 2005.
The Household SAR will contain a 1 per cent hierarchical sample, of some 245,000 records of households and individuals in those households. We are considering the conditions of access with the aim of making this file available at some time within the next 3 months provided licensing arrangements can be agreed. Further information will follow when the work is nearing completion.
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