The British Columbia Inter-university Research Data Centre (BCIRDC) is a research facility of Simon Fraser University, The University of British Columbia, and The University of Victoria. The Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the BC Knowledge Development Fund provided support for the establishment of the BCIRDC, and operating support is provided by Simon Fraser University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Victoria, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Statistics Canada.

The BCIRDC provides access, for approved projects, to selected Statistics Canada confidential microdata household, population and workplace files, including:

• Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS)
• Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS)
• General Social Survey (GSS selected cycles)
• Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC)
• National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY)
• National Population Health Survey (NPHS)
• Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID)
• Workplace and Employee Survey (WES)
• Youth in Transition Survey and the Programme for International Student Assessments (YITS-PISA)

Access to confidential microdata from other Statistics Canada surveys can also be arranged for approved projects. For more detailed information on the current availability of microdata files, click here.

Access to the centre is granted to researchers with a project approved through a special application and peer review process of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Statistics Canada. For information on the application process, click here.

The doors of the BCIRDC are open to faculty and graduate students from SFU, UBC and UVic, who have an approved project. The centre is located at the Walter C. Koerner Library of UBC. The RDC program encourages researchers to collaborate on team projects. The centre can support both individual and team research projects. We can also facilitate team projects conducted in more than one RDC when team members are located outside British Columbia. For a listing of RDCs across Canada, click here.

The centre grants researchers direct access to the confidential microdata from Statistics Canada's longitudinal surveys and many other household surveys. Since researchers are required to access and analyze the data within the centre, the BCIRDC offers a comprehensive research environment with a closed local area network consisting of a powerful Novell server that supports eight PC workstations and two Macintosh workstations. Each workstation offers a wide choice of statistical software. Additional software will be added as required.

The PC workstations have dual processors with Windows 2000 operating system. They are each loaded with the following software:

• DBMSCOPY v 8.0
• DBMSExplorer v 8.0
• EpiInfo 2002
• Gauss v 6.0
• GiveWin v 2.01
• HLM v 6.0
• LISREL v 8.8
• MATLAB v 7.4.0.287
• Mplus v 4.2
• MSPWin v 5.0
• S-PLUS 6.2
• SAS v 9.1
• SPSS v 15.0
• Stat/Transfer 8
• Stata/SE v 10.0
• SUDAAN 9.01
• WesVar v 4.3
• WinBUG v 1.4.2
• Compaq Array Viewer 1.6
• Compaq Visual Fortran 6
• R 2.5.1
• Python 2.5
• MiKteX 2.4.1667
• Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0
• Microsoft Office 2003
• MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0a
• WinZip 9.0
• Adobe Reader 7.0

A staff member (RDC Analyst) is available to provide you with information on the RDC program, applying for access, the Statistics Canada datasets, and to assist with the disclosure risk assessment process for removing analytic results from the RDC. The disclosure risk assessment process ensures that no potentially confidential information on respondents leaves the centre.

The operating hours for the centre, when researchers will have access, will vary over the course of the year, in line with the opening hours of the Koerner Library. As well, the centre will be closed to researchers for short periods when a staff member is not available.

The centre is generally open from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm from Monday to Friday. Please see the calendar for scheduled closings.

The regular staff person is Lee Grenon of Statistics Canada.

The BCIRDC is an interuniversity facility and service for Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. Dr. Nicole Fortin is the BCIRDC Academic Director and chairs the interuniversity committee that oversees the continuing development of the centre. The centre is part of a national network of Research Data Centres (RDCs) established as part of the Canadian Initiative on Social Statistics (CISS). This initiative is a collaborative program between SSHRC and Statistics Canada to strengthen our country's social research capacity, support policy-relevant research, and to provide insights on issues important to the Canadian public. Specifically, the RDCs will provide increased use of Statistics Canada's rich data for academic and policy-relevant research. The Canadian Foundation for Innovation has provided support for the establishment of the BCIRDC.