Methodbox: Preparing for National Service Shoaib Sufi 11/10/11

Obesity Epidemic Fragmented understanding of public health problems such as obesity...data, methods/models and expertise split across disciplines (e.g. social vs. biomedical) and settings (e.g. academia vs. healthcare)

Puddles of research around the organising principle … but policies need the big picture

Cross disciplinary research Problem Lots of data + un-connected expertise Solution Easier to find relevant data + find experts/expertise

Investigation Cycle Data Our Tooling focus is (survey) Data and Analysis Our main Community focus is Expertise via Methods/Analysis/Scripts Analysis Models Results Questions Publications, Reports or Decisions Tooling Community

Examples: HSE 2006 data set 13 pages208 pages Variable Definitions Variable Categories Variable SPSS code Questionnaire Instructions 224 pages Questions used To set variables 148 pages Survey Description 9 pages Variable Value Domains 351 pages 46 MB data files Data and Variable Variables

HSE All HSE 18 datasets in all of HSE

Just 5 surveys HSEHSE HSEHSE HSEHSE HSEHSE HSEHSE HSEHSE HSEHSE MethodBox serves 69 surveys !

MethodBox Features Searching for Surveys, Datasets, Variables Exploring Variable data summaries Shopping metaphor for Variable selection Creating Subsets User Profiles Security (Authentication/Authorisation) Groups & Public links Upload Scripts Comments and notes Linking resources Registering PubMed Id or DOI publications Upload your own survey style data (CSV + DDI2)

e-Lab Socially-stimulating science, in-silico Research Object Find Share Reuse Data-sources Data-preparation scripts Research protocolStatistical analysis scripts Slides Working datasets Figures/Graphics Manuscripts References Analysis-logs & notes

survey results

variable results & details

Quotes MethodBox just seems to be a lot more intuitive… You can just put in 'bus + scotland' or whatever it was and it will just go 'ta-da!'. It's all relevant and you can understand what's come up. You don't just get a load of codes and titles of surveys. I'd use MethodBox to see if there were other suitable datasets [for my PhD research]. It would be useful to see if I could get more detailed or more recent stuff as well. If anything did come up, if I thought, 'oh that looks quite interesting' I can just go off on a tangent and have a look at habitualized recycling behaviour or whatever. I can just look at specific things that maybe the main dataset that I'm using doesn't have. I can use it to explore other options.

How MethodBox fits in UK Data Archive (UKDA) MethodBox Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) Survey Curation Survey Mapping diagram not to scale Survey Navigation Survey Commissioning & Collection etc… Improving Access & Use

Where we are upto MethodBox launched at an ESDS government event April 2010 (5.7/7 from 15 responses) 69 surveys available (e.g. HSE) 259 datasets (e.g. HSE 2008) 176 data extracts 51 scripts 400 unique visits in the last month (up 25%)

Sustainability Meet Data Provider requirements – Curation (content vs. service) – Support – Scaling (further surveys) – Licensing – Branding Formative evaluation usability/improvements Knowledge transfer – building a close link with the delivery team at UKDA Platform for further developing ‘Amazon like features’

Vanessa Higgins Rob Haines Caroline Jay