GradProSkills

GPLL235 - Canadian Statistics and Microdata for the Social Sciences


Description

This workshop will focus on the main sources of social statistics in Canada, namely Statistics Canada's Website, more specifically the Data section and the Canadian Census. Provincial statistics (Institut de la Statistique du Québec) will also be mentioned. The second part of the presentation will present the concept of microdata and introduce students to data available through the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI). We will review the best methods to identify relevant surveys. The various types of data files (PUMFs, Master Files) will be described and students will be shown how to access those files via the Odesi database or by going to the Research Data Centre at McGill (QICSS). There will be a demonstration of Odesi which will focus on searching the platform for surveys and individual variables and on downloading datasets and associated documentation.

Learning Objectives

In this workshop, participants will:
 
1.  Become familiar with the main Canadian sources of aggregate statistics and microdata
2.  Differentiate between aggregate statistics and Microdata  
3.  Be able to perform searches for microdata sets at the survey and variable levels

Leaders Information

This workshop is led by Alex Guindon.
 
Alex Guindon is the GIS/Data librarian at Concordia University. Mr. Guindon obtained a Master in Political Science from Université du Québec à Montréal and a Master in Library and Information Science from Université de Montréal. He has been working as a librarian at Concordia since 2000 and has been a liaison librarian for French Studies, Geography and Political Science. His current research interest is the description, indexing and accessibility of Census data , going back to pre-confederation censuses.