This is a new section of the portal which in the near future will contain a number of articles to do with education and training. In particular, they will relate to the processing and analysis of data from questionnaire surveys and the use of software packages in market and social research. So far, there are three articles for you to read. Special thanks to John Hall who will be submitting some of the articles for this section. John was Senior Research Fellow in the SSRC Survey Unit (Director, the late Dr Mark Abrams) from 1970 to 1976, then Principal Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Survey Research Unit at the Polytechnic of North London from 1976 to 1992 when he took early retirement; he now lives in France, but maintains an active interest in the development of social research methods in the UK. He has been involved in survey research since 1965 and has used SPSS to process and analyse dozens of surveys since 1971 (ranging from small local studies to major national surveys), and has advised hundreds of researchers on its use. The articles are based on materials from the highly successful hands-on courses in data management and analysis which he developed at PNL and taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students (most with little or no previous experience of statistics or computers) over a period of 16 years. Originally written in WordStar4 for use with SPSS™ on a variety of mainframes (most recently the Vax cluster at PNL) they have now been converted to MS-Word and updated and revised for use with SPSS for Windows™ on a PC. This conversion means that some of the content in tabular form, whilst reasonably clear, has not always retained its original format. We are working hard to resolve this. Further training materials with more complex tabular formats and in full colour, including slide-shows and fully worked examples of SPSS, are available at Journeys in Survey Research John would particularly welcome feedback on ease of understanding and usefulness of his articles: he can be contacted on johnfhall@orange.fr
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