Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, 2008

DOI

10.17605/OSF.IO/3X6CF

Summary

The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey was launched in the autumn of 1998. Its mission has been to monitor the attitudes and behaviour of people in Northern Ireland during the late 1990s and into the present century, in order to provide a time-series and a public record of how our attitudes and behaviour develop on a wide range of social policy issues. The survey is run on a modular format. Two modules are repeated every year (Political Attitudes and Community Relations), and the rest of the survey varies annually with all the modules designed to be repeated in years to come. The specialty modules for 2008 are Attitudes to Older People, Religious Observance, and Minority Ethnic People.

Each year, more than 30 countries participate in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), in which the same module of questions is asked cross-nationally. Northern Ireland has taken part in this exercise (via NISA) since 1989. The 1998 module covered religion. Full ISSP datasets can be obtained from the Zentralarchiv in Koln, Germany, where the datasets from the member countries are assembled.

The ARDA has added four additional variables to the original data set to enhance the users' experience on our site.

Data File

Cases: 1215
Variables: 417
Weight Variable: WTFACTOR

Please note that all analyses of the adult data should be weighted in order to allow for disproportionate household size. The weighting variable is called WTFACTOR. The only exceptions are the few household variables (for example, tenure and household income), which do not need to be weighted.

Data Collection

October 1, 2008-February 28, 2009

Original Survey (Instrument)

Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey

Funded By

Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister; Economic and Social Research Council; The Atlantic Philanthropies

Collection Procedures

The 2008 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey involved 1,216 face-to-face interviews with adults aged 18 years or over. The main interview was carried out using computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and the respondent was then asked to complete a self-completion questionnaire.

Sampling Procedures

The sample for the 2008 survey consisted of a systematic random sample of addresses selected from the Land and Property Services Agency list of private addresses. This is the most up-to-date listing of private households and is made available to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency for research purposes. People living in institutions (though not in private households in such institutions) are excluded. A total of 2,350 addresses were selected for interview.

The Land and Property Services Agency provides a good sampling frame of addresses, but contains no information about the number of people living at an address. Further selection stages were therefore required to convert the listing of addresses to a listing of individuals from which one person (the 'selected respondent') is chosen to complete the questionnaire.

The interviewers listed all members of the household eligible for inclusion in the sample: that is, all persons aged 18 or over living at the address. From this listing of eligible adults, the interviewer's computer randomly selected one adult. This person, the selected respondent, was then asked to complete the interview.

Principal Investigators

ARK (Access Research Knowledge), Northern Ireland

Related Publications

Vacant Seats and Empty Pews, by Bernadette C. Hayes and Lizanne Dowds, ARK Research Update 65, February 2010.
https://www.ark.ac.uk/ARK/publications/overview

For more information go to https://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/results/relres.html.