The Brexit survey

Several pages in this course use the data from the 2016 Hansard Survey. The survey was soon after the Brexit referendum, so we often refer to it as the Brexit Survey.

Every year, the Hansard Society sponsors a survey on political engagement in the UK.

They put topical questions in each survey. For the 2016 / 7 survey, they asked about how people voted in the Brexit referendum.

Luckily, they make the data freely available online for us to analyze.

You can get the data for yourself from the UK Data Service: https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8183. There are data files in various formats, including:

• SPSS format (for the SPSS statistical package);
• Stata format (for the Stata statistical package);
• tab-delimited (a general data format, that can be used with Pandas, Excel, and other packages).

The data is in a standard form, with one row per respondent, and one column per question.

We have an unchanged copy of the tab-delimited version of the data file for you to download directly. We have also made a copy of the document describing the questions they ask and the way that they have recorded the answers in the data file. This is often called the “data dictionary”. It was originally in Rich Text Format, but I have converted to PDF for convenience. It is otherwise identical to the file you will find at the UK Data Service.

You can download these copies from the following links:

• Brexit survey tab-delimited data file;
• Brexit survey data dictionary PDF file.