Researcher Experience: Matthew Iveson
Our first Researcher Experience post is from Matthew Iveson, Senior Data Scientist at the University of Edinburgh. Matthew has been working with Scottish administrative records for about four years. Data sets he has worked with include Scottish Morbidity Records, Scottish Census, Prescribing Information System, NHS Central Register, NRS Births, Deaths and Marriages, Scottish Stroke Care Audit. He has also worked with the Scottish Longitudinal Study, a set of pre-linked administrative data sets. We asked Matthew to tell us a bit about his research and the routine data he has worked with, what he saw were some of the key challenges in accessing and using administrative records, and to offer his thoughts to early career researchers hoping to work with this kind of data.
Brief overview of Matthew’s research
My work has mainly focused around using data linkage to reconstruct the life-courses of individuals who took part in the Scottish Mental Survey 1947, a nation-wide survey of age-11 thinking skills conducted in Scottish Schools in 1947. These individuals, now aged over 80 years-old, have experienced a lifetime of changes in health and socioeconomic circumstances, and are an extremely important opportunity for examining how early-life circumstances can have a lasting impact on health and wellbeing across the life course.
So far, I have used linked data to show that individuals with higher childhood cognitive ability, better socioeconomic circumstances and more education are less likely to die, less likely to…