Data Handling in EU-SILC

Abstract

This report aims to assist researchers who conduct analysis on the basis of the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The main objective is to explain the structure of the EU-SILC data and aid researchers in compiling information from the different data files. To this aim, the report includes a number of practical examples which explain how to merge the different files and how to aggregate information from different levels of analysis. All practical examples include code for both SPSS and Stata which can be used or customized to construct data files for different types of analyses. The primary target audience of this report is quantitative researchers with little experience with complex datasets. However it might also prove useful to more experienced analysts unfamiliar with the specifics of the EU-SILC.