About How-to

How-To

Use the data portal to help you understand people better

BBC Media Action’s Data Portal houses reports and interactive survey data from 15 countries, mainly in Africa and Asia.

The Data Portal is open-source and we hope you can use the data and analysis available here in your own work to understand how to reach people, know your beneficiaries better and to develop communications better.

Organised by theme and country, choose a data set and then choose a question you would like to answer. This then leads you to sub questions. Once you have chosen a question you can filter the data by attributes like age, education, gender, occupation and location (urban/rural).

Videos guides on how to use the portal and the main features available are here and here.

Below, using the resilience data, is an example of how you can navigate the data portal.

The Resilience data provides data on how people are feeling about climate and environmental changes. For example, you can explore what people’s biggest concerns are? Here are the steps to take to explore this data.

1) On the data portal home page, click on ‘Theme’ and select ‘Resilience’

There are a number of countries with resilience research data. You can view results by country; at the left side of the page, click on ‘Explore data’, this will display all the countries available

2) Select the country you are interested in i.e. ‘Bangladesh 2016’

3) Select the question for example ‘How do people view their lives’. You will see a list of sub-questions, Select ‘How do people feel their lives are’

then select

‘Out of the following list, which is your biggest worry at the moment?’

4) When you click on this question you will see a chart showing the data for this question. If you want to get the data on an excel, click on the ‘Export CSV’ box.

To explore the data further you can split data by different variables, these are the variables you can look at:

• Age
• Audiences
• Gender
• Data time points – compare latest data set with previous ones, this is available on some data sets. In resilience this is just available for Bangladesh.
• Education – High, medium, Low
• Media Exposure- High, medium, Low
• Occupation – Farmers/Fishermen; Traders/Businessmen; Students/Teachers; Housewives/retired
• Purchasing Power – High, medium, low, very low
• Urban/Rural

We have produced two video guides that explain how to use the data portal and explore the data further. These are available here and here.

How to add breaks

5) On the top left of the chart or graph, you will see an ‘Add break’ box; click on the box to display a list of demographic variables that are available i.e. Age, gender, occupation, audience etc.

6) Select a specific demographic variable i.e. ‘Gender’ to see the results for that question by responses for men and women

7) You can add an additional variable to your results by clicking on the ‘Add second break’ box to display the list of demographic variables i.e. if you want to look at what young women aged 18-24 are worrying about.

8) You can clear previously added break variables at any point by selecting ‘Clear Break’ in the ‘Add break’ box

How to export data or print the data

Data can be exported at different stages i.e. top level or after one or two break variables have been added. As mentioned above, click on the ‘Export CSV’ box. This will give you an excel file with the data.

You can also print the data by clicking on the ‘Print’ box

Understanding the data

The total number of respondents and question text are displayed at the top of the chart or table. The questionnaire and methodologies used to get the data are available in the related tools.