Data from the Wolrd Bank

There is a wealth of data-sets pretty much about every country in the world available for free from April 2010 by the World Bank. Data ranges from agricultural use, educational / medical standards to financial development indicators. I discovered this resource while looking for some macroeconomic data for one of my PhD experiments. Weirdly enough I ended up browsing the huge data-set for hours and had a great time discovering the various differences in education, health and economic production between countries. For example I found that people are very keen about education in Kazachstan, in certain years even more so than in France - play around by selecting different countries.

Arable land (% of land area)

Data from World Bank, Martin's Blog :-)

You can even compose cool widgets like the one above!

I personally most enjoy browsing the data by the actual available indicators and getting to know what they mean. I found this to be a great resource and hence had to share it with my readers and btw. there's also an API for any developers out there, looks pretty neat.

Other Institutions have also opened up much of their data-records:

• US Bureau of Labout Statistics
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the famous BEA)
• US Data.gov
• EU Eurostat
• OECD
• UK National Statistics

My favourite book on many of these indicators is the book by Richard Yamarone - I read parts of it and it is an enlightening read, Richard provides a complete view of each discussed indicator, it's history, it's derivations, computation and uses. Highly recommended!

Constructing Surveys

Today I was looking at survey construction and survey design, since I have to prepare a survey. I intend to use the results of the survey to support a specific argument in my PhD Thesis. It isn't a large part of my work, and hence I don't want to spend too much time on this, however not surprisingly I found a lot of excellent sources on survey construction (whether offline, online, free form - interview, or closed form, see this link for a wider set of survey definitions).

An excellent introduction to surveys in social sciences, detailing the different types of answer collection (i.e. likert scales, guttman scales, semantic differentials, ranking and filter/contingency questions) can be found here. Some example questions are provided here. Maybe most useful to serious and academic-level research, are these resources: 1-a journal article detailing the stages of interview construction in a systematic manner, 2-a report for the US-Census Buro (2006) on question types and question styles (e.g. mentions academic research that argues against using "Don't know" answers in interviews, and reasons why that is the case).

My Personal Page

I just set-up my personal page (my blog is still here) on the lboro.ac.uk server, feel free to pay it a visit - http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~comds2...