9th October 2013, 12:17 PM
Unitof1 Wrote:Its good to see that they are attempting to separate out the type of unit-charity trust etc. Its also good to see that they try recognise the concept of self employed..... I don't know if it is a paradigm thing from some constraint made by the commissioners of the survey requiring yearly salary view but I think that it is a great shame that they did not present a Post profile (in an appendix 1) of respondents who claimed to be self-employed when they obviously went to the trouble to ask people if they were self-employed and when a lot of the reported problems of the survey were reported in appendix 2 as
Hey Unit, first thanks for compliments.
A lot of data is in there because someone might need it. A lot of it is in there because of legacy e.g. we want a time view of data so we keep asking the same questions. Averages being in there for both reasons.
So post profiles- I briefly pulled together some info for a post profile on the subject but it was all over the place- Some people made 8k and some 40k so a lot of what is in a post profile- average wage, ages. Would have been all over the place and pretty much useless in terms of how post profiles are presented.
However, the data is going to be in ADS so you can have a look at the raw numbers if you want. Though you will find self-employed captures such a wide range of activities- ceramic specialists to museum archaeologists it will be a bit hard to say anything general about them.
Finally, I would say you highlight a really great issue with this survey- does it represent my concerns be it for self-employed, digger, government etc. The short answer is, not perfectly. For example, some of the responses to the question about turnover was- hey we are a council department we don't have turnover.
The survey captures all archaeologists and we are very very diverse. Museum archaeologists do not have the same concerns as an illustrator or monument inspector or (insert one of the hundreds of possible jobs archaeologists have). Some questions are more applicable to one group over others. The trick is finding the right balance between everyone conflicting needs to keep the survey under 100s of questions. I imagine everyone will have an opinion on what data should and should not have been collected based on their own experiences or needs. We tried to take a more balanced approach and get little bit for every i.e. piss off everyonexx( by not asking all the questions they want.
Like all datasets it is best worked with by taking what you need from it. For example-The Invisible Diggers is probably the best example of what conditions are like for diggers. PP can act as a way to highlight the poor pay conditions relative to other archaeologists for diggers.
Or as you did with your example of pulling out the quotes- the quantitative data can give you a decent understand of some of the problems faced by self-employed etc. etc.
Like tools in your tool kit- a trowel is a good tool but not the only tool. It does a great job cleaning stuff but a poor job of measuring anything, for that you need a tape. PP is a tool but not the only tool for looking at the conditions of archaeology in the UK. Like any good tool kit it works well when you have a diverse range of tools in it.