TableBuilder: Cultural Activities, Australia

This product provides information about the release of microdata from the Cultural Activities Survey, Australia, 2017-18, including details about how to access and use TableBuilder. Data Item Lists and information on the quality of the microdata are also provided, along with links to details of survey definitions and methodology.

Microdata are the most detailed information available from a survey and are generally the responses to individual questions on the questionnaire or data derived from two or more questions. This level of detail is released with the approval of the Australian Statistician.

The Cultural Activities survey was conducted throughout Australia from July 2017 to June 2018 and is designed to provide annual statistics about participation and attendance in selected cultural activities. This TableBuilder product is the only microdata release from this survey.

Microdata for the Cultural Activities Survey are available through the TableBuilder product - an online tool for creating tables and graphs that can be accessed from the ABS website.

Further information about TableBuilder and other information to assist users in understanding and accessing microdata in general, is available from the Microdata Entry Page.

To apply for access to TableBuilder, register and apply in the Registration Centre. All ABS products and services are provided subject to the ABS Conditions of Sale. Any queries relating to these Conditions of Sale should be emailed to intermediary.management@abs.gov.au.

Further information on access steps can be found in How to Apply for Microdata on the ABS website. Clients should familiarise themselves with the Responsible Use of ABS Microdata, User Guide and the information contained in the TableBuilder, User Guide before applying for access

Further information about the survey and the microdata product:

• A detailed list of data items for TableBuilder is available in the Data downloads section
• In the Quality Declaration section
• Other related information can be found within Attendance at Selected Cultural Venues and Events, Australia (cat. no. 4114.0) and Participation in Selected Cultural Activities, Australia (cat. no. 4921.0).

For further support in the use of this product, please contact Microdata Access Strategies on (02) 6252 7714 or via microdata.access@abs.gov.au.

Other data from the survey may be available from the ABS on request. Subject to confidentiality and data quality constraints, special tabulations can be produced incorporating data items, populations and geographic areas selected to meet individual requirements. These are available on request, on a fee for service basis. Contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070 or client.services@abs.gov.au for further information.

The Census and Statistics Act 1905 includes a legislative guarantee to respondents that their confidentiality will be protected. This is fundamental to the trust the Australian public has in the ABS, and that trust is in turn fundamental to the excellent quality of ABS information. Without that trust, survey respondents may be less forthcoming or truthful in answering ABS questionnaires. For more information, see 'Avoiding inadvertent disclosure' and 'Microdata' on our web page How the ABS keeps your information confidential.

The release of microdata must satisfy the ABS legislative obligation to release information in a manner that is not likely to enable the identification of a particular person or organisation. Therefore, in accordance with the Census and Statistics Act, a confidentiality process is applied to the data in TableBuilder to avoid releasing information that may lead to the identification of individuals, families, households, dwellings or businesses.

Prior to being granted access to TableBuilder users must agree to the ABS Terms and Conditions for Microdata and TableBuilder access.

Microdata access is priced according to the ABS Pricing Policy and Commonwealth Cost Recovery Guidelines. For microdata prices refer to the Microdata prices web page.

The ABS/Universities Australia Agreement provides participating universities with access to a range of ABS products and services. This includes access to microdata. For further information, university clients should refer to the ABS/Universities Australia Agreement web page.

Information or data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics must be acknowledged responsibly whenever it is used. Citing, or referencing is important for several reasons, including acknowledging that one has used the ideas, words or data of others. Accurately citing sources used also allows others to find and use the original information. For information on how to cite ABS data refer to Help: How to cite ABS Sources.

The ABS Privacy Policy outlines how the ABS handles any personal information that you provide to us.

The Cultural Activities Survey, Australia, 2017-18, was a topic on the Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS) conducted throughout Australia from July 2017 to June 2018. The MPHS, undertaken each financial year by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), is a supplement to the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) and is designed to collect statistics for a number of small, self-contained topics. The Cultural Activities Survey was collected via two of the topics: Cultural Attendance and Cultural Participation. For the purposes of this microdata release the two topics have been combined then separated into two datasets: Cultural Activities, 2017-18 - Adults and Cultural Activities, 2017-18 - Children. Further detail can be found within the File Structure page.

Detailed information about the Cultural Activities Survey, Australia, 2017-18, including summary results, are available in the publications Attendance at Selected Cultural Venues and Events, Australia (cat. no. 4114.0) and Participation in Selected Cultural Activities, Australia (cat. no. 4921.0). The Explanatory notes tab from each of these publications includes information about the survey including scope and coverage, survey design, data collection methodology, weighting, benchmarking and estimation, and the reliability of estimates. The Data downloads section from each publication provides access to all published summary tables, in Excel spreadsheet format.

The Cultural Activities Survey, Australia, 2017-18 consisted of two topics collected on the 2017-18 Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS). These two topics asked respondents across Australia a range of questions about their participation and attendance in selected cultural activities over a 12 month period. Responses to these questions, along with a range of socio-demographic data are available as Microdata through TableBuilder. There are two available Microdata files: one contains the data from respondents 15 years and over (Cultural Activities, 2017-18 - Adults) and the other children between the ages of 5 to 14 years (Cultural Activities, 2017-18 - Children). Each Microdata file has three levels, as illustrated below:

Person/Child level

The Person level contains all of the standard demographic characteristics of each person such as age, sex, country of birth, education and labour force status. The Child level contains demographic characteristics of each child. The level also contains person/child characteristic data items relevant to participation and attendance in selected cultural activities. Each person/child is represented in a single record.

In addition, the level includes some household characteristics applicable to the respondent such as equivalised weekly household income and whether any children aged 14 years or under are present in the household.

All geographic identifiers are included on the Person/Child level (i.e. state/territory of usual residence, remoteness area and capital city/balance of state).

Cultural participation level

The Cultural participation levels contain the type of cultural activities that have been participated in and the amount of time the respondent participated in each particular activity, and for adults, whether they received income or were volunteers. A person may be represented by one or more records, depending on how many different activities they participated in.

Cultural attendance level

The Cultural attendance levels contain the type of cultural venue or event that has been attended and the amount of time the respondent attended that particular venue or event. A person may be represented by one or more records, depending on how many different venues or events they attended.

There are two TableBuilder Datasets available for the Cultural Activities Survey in 2017-18. One contains data for all persons aged 15 and over (adults) and the other for children aged 5 to 14 (children). They each contain both participation and attendance data combined. This is in contrast to the summary publications which only include participation or attendance data but include both adults and children together. Adults and children have been kept separate for the TableBuilder product as they are weighted separately and data items are not able to be cross-classified across the two levels due to the selection methodology used.

The levels and sub-categories available on each TableBuilder Dataset are shown below:

The MPHS is a sample survey of private dwellings in Australia. Results from the survey are weighted in order to infer results for the total in-scope population. To do this, a ‘weight’ is allocated to each survey respondent, which indicates the number of persons in the in-scope population that they represent.

There is one benchmarked weight for each of the Adults (called Persons) and Children (called Children) datasets. The weight for each person and child has been applied to their record(s) across each of the file levels for the Microdata product. This means that for the Person and Child levels, which contain a single record per respondent, the sum of the weights across all records will equal the estimated residential population of Australia (aged 15 years and over for the Adults dataset and children aged 5 to 14 for the Children dataset).

For more information regarding the weighting process, refer to the Technical Note section on the Methodology page in Participation in Selected Cultural Activities, Australia (cat. no. 4921.0).

Note: TableBuilder automatically applies the appropriate weight when creating tables.

Most data items included in the Microdata include a 'Not applicable' category. The 'Not applicable' category comprises those respondents who were not asked a particular question and hence are not applicable to the population to which the data item refers. The classification values of the 'Not applicable' category, where relevant, are shown in the Data Item List in the Data downloads section.

For some data items certain classification values have been reserved as special codes and must not be added as if they were quantitative values. These special codes generally relate to data items such as income. For example, code 9999999998 for the data item 'Weekly personal income from all sources', refers to 'Not stated'.

The population relevant to each data item is shown in the Data Item List and should be considered when extracting and analysing the Microdata. The actual population count for each data item is equal to the total cumulative frequency minus the 'Not applicable' category.

Generally, all populations, including very specific populations, can be 'filtered' using other relevant data items. For example, if the population of interest is 'Employed persons', any data item with that population (excluding the 'Not applicable' category) can be used as a filter.

For general information relating to TableBuilder and instructions on how to use features of the TableBuilder product, please refer to the Table Builder, User Guide (cat. no. 1406.0.55.005).

Specific information applicable to Cultural Activities, Australia, 2017-18 TableBuilder product is outlined below.

Weighting is the process of adjusting results from a sample survey to infer results for the total population. To do this, a 'weight' is allocated to each sample unit. The weight is the value that indicates how many population units are represented by the sample unit.

As the format of the 2017-18 Cultural Activities TableBuilder files are at the person or child level, there is only one weight provided on each - a person or child weight. That is, all tables produced provide estimates of the number of people with particular characteristics. The Summation Options section in the customised Table View panel in TableBuilder contains this weight. As there is only one weight available, the person or child weight (Persons for the Adults dataset and Children for the Children dataset) will be automatically applied when producing tables.

Sampling error is a measure of the difference between published estimates, derived from a sample of persons, and the value that would have been produced if the total population (as defined by the scope of the survey) had been included in the survey.

One measure of the likely difference is given by the standard error (SE), which indicates the extent to which an estimate might have varied because only a sample of dwellings was included. There are about two chances in three (67%) that the sample estimate will differ by less than one SE from the figure that would have been obtained if all dwellings had been included, and about 19 chances in 20 (95%) that the difference will be less than two SEs.

Relative standard error (RSE) is a measure of sampling variability. The RSE is obtained by expressing the SE as a percentage of the estimate to which it is related.

Data users should note that TableBuilder automatically produces the RSE of the estimate. Users can output RSE values for a produced table by clicking on the ‘Options’ button, hovering over the ‘Relative Standard Error’ tab and selecting either ‘RSE’ or ‘Summation + RSE’. Selecting ‘RSE’ will simply display the RSEs in each cell of the table. On the other hand, selecting ‘Summation + RSE’ will show both the estimate and the RSE highlighted in red.

For more information for using RSEs in TableBuilder, refer to the Relative Standard Error page of the TableBuilder, User Guide (cat. no. 1406.0.55.005).

TableBuilder includes a number of continuous variables which can have a response value at any point along a continuum. Some continuous data items are allocated special codes for certain responses (e.g. 000 = 'Not applicable').

When creating ranges in TableBuilder for such continuous items, special codes will automatically be excluded. Therefore the total will show only 'valid responses' rather than all responses (including special codes). Continuous items with special codes have a corresponding categorical item in the Person Level Data Items that provides the ability to display data for the special code. Any special codes for continuous data items are listed in the Data Item List.

Note that there are no continuous data items for cultural attendance.

A number of the survey's data items allow respondents to report more than one response. These are referred to as 'multiple response' data items. An example of such a data item is 'Type of cultural activity undertaken in last 12 months (multiple response)'. For this data item, respondents may have undertaken any combination of one or more of the selected activities in the last 12 months.

When a multiple-response data item is tabulated, a person is counted against each category for which they have provided a response. Therefore the sum of the components will be more than or equal to the total population, as some persons are counted multiple times. Multiple–response data items can be identified in the Data Item List, as they include 'multiple response' in the data item label. The Data Item List can be accessed from the Data downloads section.

Most data items include a 'Not applicable' category. The 'Not applicable' category comprises those respondents who were not asked a particular question(s) and hence are not applicable to the population to which the data item refers. The classification value of the 'Not applicable' category, where relevant, is shown in the Data Item List and can be accessed from the Data downloads section.

To minimise the risk of identifying individuals in aggregate statistics, a technique is used to randomly adjust cell values. This technique is called perturbation. Perturbation involves small random adjustment of the statistics and is considered the most satisfactory technique for avoiding the release of identifiable statistics while maximising the range of information that can be released. These adjustments have a negligible impact on the underlying pattern of the statistics.

After perturbation, a given published cell value will be consistent across all tables. However, adding up cell values to derive a total will not necessarily give the same result as published totals. The introduction of perturbation in publications ensures that these statistics are consistent with statistics released via services such as TableBuilder.

A complete list of all Cultural Activities Survey, Australia, 2017-18 TableBuilder data items available for use, including relevant population and classification details, can be found in the Excel spreadsheet in the Data downloads section.

Data items are generally available for cross tabulation using the TableBuilder. Multiple-response data items include 'multiple-response' in the data item label.

A glossary of definitions for the data items can be found in the Glossary section on the Methodology page of the Attendance at Selected Cultural Venues and Events, Australia (cat. no. 4114.0) and Participation in Selected Cultural Activities, Australia (cat. no. 4921.0) publications.

Users intending to purchase the TableBuilder product should ensure that the data they require, and the level of detail required, are available and applicable for the intended use.

This release previously used catalogue number 4921.0.55.001.