Special Data Collections

New datasets received by ISDC goes through a procedure of checking, reformatting, documenting and preparing a user-friendly product. However, this page describes only few collections that got particular upgrading by the ISDC staff. Several data collections comprise 5 or more datasets, which have been collected using the same design and method. Although their data structure may not be similar, they have been brought to the same format and use the same metadata. Other collections encompass time series, are managed, updated and extended on a regular basis by ISDC.

Typical data collections are:

 

Israel Election Studies: 1969 - 2006
1981-1995 Labor Force Surveys in Judea Samaria and Gaza
ETSI - Economic Time Series for Israel
Israel Population Censuses - Small Area Statistics

Israel Election Studies: 1969 - 2006 
Conducted by Asher Arian & Michal Shamir

The aim of these studies is to investigate voting patterns, public opinion, and political participation in Israel. Their by-product is a high quality data collection that serves research needs of social scientists, teachers and students, who are concerned with the theoretical and empirical foundations of mass politics in Israel society. Since several questions have been repeatedly investigated throughout the last 34 years, these surveys formulate a unique source of information on public opinion trends and political behavior in Israel. Since 1969, Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, (who joint him later on) conduct these surveys previous to and sometimes also subsequent to, each elections to the Knesset and recently also to the Prime Minister.

See list of Bibliography.

Election studies design:
1969 Three waves during August - December 1969 (not a panel study)
1974 Five waves during May 1973 - January 1974. Only the first 2 - phases consists panel
1977 Three Pre-election waves in March - May and one post-election wave in June 1977 (a panel study)
1981 Three pre-election waves during March - June 1981
1984 One phase pre-election study, July 1984
1988 Two pre-election waves, conducted from December 1987 to October 1988
1992 One phase pre-election survey, conducted in June 1992
1996 One phase pre-election survey, conducted in May 1996
1999 Two wave's panel: a pre-election survey conducted in April-May and a post-election survey conducted right after the elections in May 1999
2001 A pre-election survey conducted between January 7 and February 4, 2001
2003 A pre-election survey conducted in January 2003
2006 A Pre-election survey conducted in February 28-March 23. Post-election survey conducted in March 30-April 23, 2006

Each election study addresses a wide range of substantive themes including: expectations about the election outcome; perceptions and evaluations of the major parties and their candidates; information about politics; partisanship; assessments of the relative importance of major problems facing the country; attention to campaign coverage in the mass media (in recent studies); feelings of political efficacy; political values; conservatism vs. liberalism; trust in government; political participation; vote choice; economic well- being; positions on social welfare, economic, social, and civil rights issues; evaluations of political figures and groups; detailed demographic information; and measures of religious affiliation and religiosity.

The collection includes both data and metadata files. The Hebrew questionnaires were translated and converted into variable names by the ISDC staff. Please note that the variable names are abbreviations rather than full translation of the questions' text. Images of the original questionnaires are included as well. So are SAS definition statements.

The CD-Rom includes the following dictionaries:

Data files (ASCII)
Questionnaire - image files of the Hebrew questionnaires
Data files (ASCII)
Study_desc - Study descriptions from the ISDC catalog
Variable_list - from the ISDC catalog
Contents.txt - data files directory


Please note that Election Studies 1999, 2001 and 2003, including full wording of the questionnaire, are available also in Fast Analysis. 
 

1981-1995 Labor Force Surveys in Judea Samaria and Gaza

This collection contains microdata of Labor Force Surveys in Judea, Samaria and Gaza area, performed by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics during 1981 - 1995. The main purpose of these surveys was to track labor force changes in the population aged 15 and over, according to various variables. The production of this data collection has been supported by Prof. Joshua Angrist, who also contributed the 1981-1991 data to the ISDC. 15 annual datasets are grouped into 3 data files:

 

Dataset 583: 1981-1991 surveys (men only)
Dataset 582: 1992-1993 surveys
Dataset 581: 1994-1995 surveys (1995 first 3 quarters only)

Beside ASCII micro-data files, the collection includes a study description, a variable list and SAS statements for each dataset. Datasets 582 and 581 share the same format and variables list while all datasets share other parts of documentation: codebooks, appendix, the Standard Classifications of Occupations and Standard Classification of Industries. Also included are SAS data definition statements for reading the data.

Citations: 
Publications based on data of the Central Bureau of Statistics and on ISDC data should acknowledge those sources by means of bibliographic citations. publications based on the 1981-1991 surveys should also acknowledge Joshua Angrist who processed and contributed dataset 583. Users are urged to refer to Prof. Angrist's publications listed in the CD-ROM.

Directory Structure 
There are 3 directories in this collection, usually distributed on CD-ROM:

  1. DOCUMENT directory contains dataset descriptions and variable lists.
  2. DATA directory contains the 11 ASCII data files, each of them named Fyyyy.dat where yyyy is the year of accidents.
  3. SAS directory contains SAS data definition statements for 1989-1995 datasets, which can be used to generate SAS system files.
  4. Root directory. This directory contains a copy of this document and list of contents of the CD-ROM in both ASCII and MS-WORD formats.
Naming Conventions for Files 
Files have been assigned DOS-compatible names. Accordingly, each file name in the data directory has two parts: the name and the extension, separated by a period. File name extensions usually indicate the format in which a file is written, as follows:

 

dat: data file in ASCII format
txt: documentation file in ASCII format (readme files only)
doc: documentation file as MS-Word document
sas: SAS data definition statements

Restrictions 
The use of this data collection is subdue to the User¹s License listed in license.doc and license.txt in the DOCUMENT directory. Users of these data are reminded that all policies regarding the use of the ISDC data also apply to this data collection.

Users in the ISDC member institutions will not distribute data or other materials supplied by the ISDC to other members, organizations, or to individuals at other institutions without a written permission from the ISDC. While copies of the files can be made locally accessible within research groups at member institutions, copies are not to be made for users at non-member institutions nor are copies to be taken to off-site locations for non-member activities.

As with data provided on any other medium, the authorized user is responsible for the datasets he receives or purchase. Additional copies of this and other data collections may be ordered by contacting the ISDC office or website.

Acknowledgments 
This collection been prepared in 1999 by Natasha Volchkin. Translation and typing of documentation files was carried out by Yael Yifrach, both of them from the ISDC staff.

Economic Time Series for Israel (ETSI)

ETSI, consisting of time series for several hundred variables of the Israel economy, has been developed as a tool for research rather than as a source for up-to-date intelligence on the Israeli economy. In this regard, it differs from its source databases. Bank of Israel economic database maintained by its research department, the majority of which is based on the Central Bureau of Statistics. ETSI is divided into sections such as National Accounts, Balance of Payments, Labour Market, and Monetary Sector, where annual time series have, as far as possible, common start dates in the early 1960's.

 

Subject File Period Type Worksheet Number of Series Start Year
National Accounting
Data are presented both in nominal and in real series
F260 quarter NSNA-R 25 1980
quarter OSNA-R 18 1964
quarter NSNA-N 20 1964
quarter OSNA-N 17 1964
Capital Stock F261 year cs_y_series 4 1960
Labor Market F262 year lm_y_series 20 1949
quarter lm_q_series 45 1958
month lm_m_series 11 1961
Public Sector F263 year ps_y_series 6 1960
Balance of Payments F264 quarter bop_q_series 52 1962
Monetary Series F265 month mn_m_series 1 1975
quarter mn_q_series 16 1961
year mn_y_series 14 1970
Prices F266 month pr_m_series 11 1961
day pr_d_series 2 1948
quarter hm_q_series 51 1962
Housing Market F267 quarter hm_q_series 26 1975
World Data F268 month wd_m_series 6 1960
Defence Data F269 year econo 10 1960
year eximp 4 1963
year m_exp 44 1950
year macro 5 1960
year IDF 2 1974
year middle_east 7 1958
year army 8 1983

ETSI provides the underlying data rather than transformations of it. For example, it provides data on levels of variables rather than their rates of change, and it includes the underlying nominal data from which constant price aggregates are imputed.

The database was initiated by Prof. Michael Beenstock of the Hebrew University, who had also built and contributed the housing market series for the years 1975-1995. all series, except the Housing Market workbook are updated every other year.

CENSUSES - Small Area Statistics

Census of population and housing is a comprehensive source of demographic and socio-economic characteristics of individuals and households. The information generated from the data ranges from the national level to more specific profiles of small geographic units, which can not be obtained from sample surveys due to their poor representation of small areas. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics produces and publishes many figures on localities and on sub-divisions of large urban localities. ISDC acquires these outputs and produces further aggregates from the individual level dataset of the extended questionnaire. This was done on both 1995 and 1983 censuses.

Dataset 313: Small area statistics from 1983 census 
2 summary datasets were created by the ISDC from the micro-level dataset of the 1983 Census - Stage B, entailing Small Area Statistics for geographic units: locality, quarter, sub-quarter and statistical area. Records 931301 and 931302 include individual and household data from the extended questionnaire, such as demographic profile, labour force characteristics, education, income, employment, housing density and dependency ratios. The socio-economic score produced by the CBS for geographic units was added at the end of record 931301. Record 931303, received from the Central Bureau of Statistics, included Small Area Statistics for the short questionnaire detailing geographical unit classification and basic demographic details such as age, country of origin, religion and size of average household. A valuable related dataset is #315: CBS characterization and classification of geographical units by socio-economic level of the population. This dataset presents a socio-economic scores and ranking of geographic units by these scores. It also includes 16 indicators that took part in calculating the scores.

Dataset 116: Small Area Statistics of 1995 census 
This dataset incorporates tables produced and published by the CBS, with other tables prepared by the ISDC from dataset no. 113. Dataset 116 includes Small Area Statistics on demographic composition of population, its labour force characteristics, salaries, level of schooling and household characteristics. The tables were produced for all geographic divisions: for localities, sub-quarters, statistical areas, districts, sub-districts and natural areas. The tables of employed persons by occupation and economic branches (2digit classification) have been produced by the CBS. All other tables were prepared by ISDC from the extended questionnaire dataset. The tables are available in both EXCEL and ASCII formats.

Last Updated on 05/12/2006 by ISDC