2001 Individual Licensed SAR

The 2001 Individual Licensed SAR is safe data that is available to registered users for analysis outside ONS. The 2001 I-SAR can be used on your own computer without the need to have your outputs checked to ensure that they do not breach respondents' confidentiality. To this end some variables have been broad-banded to reduce disclosure risk. It is a 3 per cent sample and contains 1,843,530 individuals and includes information on age, gender, ethnicity, health, employment status, housing, amenities, family type, geography, social class, education, distance to work, workplace, hours worked and migration.The data are available for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The 3 per cent sample is an increase by comparison with 2 per cent in 1991.

In addition, the ONS have added occupational coding, not available in the census tables, for individuals aged 16-65 who last worked more than 5 years ago but less than ten years ago and for those aged 65-74 who were not currently working at the census but who had worked in the previous ten years. A full list of variables and a codebook are available.

The lowest level of geography is the Government Office Region, although Inner and Outer London are separately identified. This represents a significant reduction by comparison with the 1991 where large Local Authorities (population 120K and over) were separately identified. A quick comparison between the 1991 and 2001 SARs can be found in the Guide to the SARs.

Access

The data are available online to registered users. There is no charge for academic use and not-for profit organisations. The business sector is charged £1000 per file.

Academic users can access the file for analysis online using NESSTAR, or they can download it from the web. Both forms of access require registration with Census.ac.uk. If you have registered already there is no need to re-register.

Non-academic users can access 2001 Individual SAR by completing an End User Licence Agreement and returning it to CCSR. Overseas users can find information about access to the 2001 Individual SAR here.

Caveat-Students

The Individual SAR contains 17,930 full-time students who were enumerated at an address that was not their usual term-time residence. For these students there is only individual-level information on age, sex, marital status and full-time student status. We recommend that these students are not included in any analyses. They do not form part of the usual residents population base. They should also have been enumerated at their usual term-time residence - and thus would have been eligible for inclusion in the SARs sample — with a fully completed form.

Imputation

Those who download the Individual SAR can select a file which contains additional variables to indicate items that have been imputed, either by the One Number Census process or by the perturbation conducted on the file. Most users will want to select the file which does NOT contain this additional information.

The Controlled Access Microdata Sample (CAMS) is a more detailed version of the 2001 I-SAR available only under secure settings at ONS.