Fee structure
Students
850 NZD
Everyone else
1,700 NZD
Prerequisites
In order to enrol in this course, you must have completed VHIN Introduction to Research in the IDI whether in the same programme or in a previous year of courses. You must also have experience with writing statistical programming code, at least to the level of filtering data, creating and recoding variables, and creating data sets.
We believe that a solid understanding of IDI structure, processes, and Māori data sovereignty is essential for working safely with IDI data, and this material is covered in the one-day introductory course. It is not covered in this practical course due to time constraints.
You must also have some experience with writing statistical programming code. The minimum level required is being able to write code to perform basic tasks such as selecting and filtering data, creating new variables, and creating a data set. This experience can be in R, SAS, Stata, SQL, or similar software, but experience with point-and-click analysis only, e.g. SPSS, is not sufficient.
The course requires some basic programming in SQL, but prior SQL experience is not required. If you are new to SQL, you will be sent some short introductory SQL exercises to complete prior to the course.
Course outline
This course provides a practical computer-based introduction to some of the key skills and knowledge needed to undertake data analysis in StatsNZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). Participants will work in a real Datalab environment with real IDI data, after they have undertaken induction and confidentiality training with StatsNZ to enable safe access to the IDI environment. Note that if you have completed this training previously, you may skip the first half-day of the course and join after lunch on Day 1.
Following the induction, we cover:
- Logging in and navigating the IDI environment
- Linking IDI data tables together
- Choosing and creating a base population
- Adding demographic and other information to your population
- Understanding missing data in IDI data sets
- Removing people from your population due to death or emigration
- Finding and using metadata for IDI data sets
- Preparing data for output, and running the output checking tool.
With the prerequisites in mind, this course would be of interest to researchers and analysts who are planning to use IDI data in a Datalab environment. We cover basic skills in this area, so the course is best suited to people with no or only very little IDI experience, but this is a hands-on course and moves quickly, with no time to cover statistical programming. Anyone in a managerial, supervisory, or administrative role, who will not be working directly with IDI data, would get more benefit from our theory-based course, VHIN Introduction to Research in the IDI.
If you want any further advice on whether this course is right for you, please email nzssncourses@auckland.ac.nz and we will put you in touch with the instructors.