List of useful statistical and market research websites

Below is a list of websites I've found useful over the years in the field of market research. Hope you find them useful too, although they do have a very UK centric bias. I've split them into various areas.

Population and other country wide statistics

• Office of National Statistics - the UK government statistics website. Has millions of useful data on most aspects of the UK including economy, population, government etc. Good luck finding anything though - it’s a horrible maze of unrelated pages.
• UK & NI National Population Projections - a branch of the ONS (above) that has downloads of the national population projections for the UK, GB, Wales, Scotland, England, NI etc. Very useful and easy to navigate site if you want to know population figures for, for example, demographic weighting.
• Eurostat - the European equivalent of the ONS, it’s the statistical office of the European Union, situated in Luxembourg. The place to go for Europe wide population projections etc.
• Eurostat population projections - holds the population projections for Europe at a country level.
• Spanish Statistical Office - the Spanish equivalent of the ONS. Excellent when compared to the ONS. Population projections were a breeze to find and everything was laid out well and in an easy to read font.
• US Census Bureau - US census department
• United Nations Statistics Division - UN statistics website. Has a lot of information (demographic yearbooks, etc.) and quite a few handbooks with advice on designing samples, surveys, errors and other areas in all parts of the world.

These are only the ones that I've used over the years. There are obviously ones for other countries but the UN covers most (all?) countries. I'll add more later.

Market Research Websites

• Market Research Society - the world's leading research association (apparently). Supports and promotes market research. Has useful guidelines and advice for data protection, freedom of information, online research, questionnaire design, etc.
• ESOMAR - world association for market, social and opinion research. Another market research society.
• efamro - umbrella organisation of the European market research societies.

As you can imagine there are a lot more market research society websites out there that cover the various countries. I won't list them all (efamro covers a fair amount of Europe after all) but I will add to the list when I get time.

Market Research News Websites

• MR Web - a market research news service and jobs website. You can subscribe to their emailing list for both jobs and news which I recommend.
• Research Live - has news, articles, features and blogs. I'm assuming that it's linked to the MRS as this website is fairly prominent on there. It also has a jobs search area.

There are other obviously other websites with market research news (marketing week comes to mind) but these two are fairly good.

Statistics Websites

• R - not a statistics website exactly but a statistical software package. Does a lot of  statistical analyses out of the box and has a load of packages that can be downloaded to add functions. It does have a steep learning curve though and a lot of the syntax is very unintuitive.
• Journal of Statistical Software - publishes articles, etc. on the subject of statistical software and algorithms. Has some interesting articles and includes code for algorithms should you wish to implement them.
• Journal of Official Statistics - a lot of articles on methodology such as methods of weighting survey data, handling wave non response of panels, response rates to different question layouts etc. There's about 28 years worth of articles on here and some of them are very relevant to running panels and market research in general. It's published by  Statistics Sweden.
• GeoHive - as it says on the site, it is mainly global population statistics but also has geopolitical data. It also lists what must be all the statistical agencies in the world under it's resources section. Impressive and makes my list look rather inadequate.
• Statsoft - this the link to the textbook that describes, in broad strokes, a lot of statistical concepts. Good for an overview butt doesn't go into much detail. Statsoft also produce a data analysis software package.
• GRETL - free, open source software for regression, econometrics and time series analysis. I've never actually used it but it comes with an impressive manual describing the various analyses that are available in a lot of detail.
• Royal Statistical Society - a society with the mission statement of 'Advancing the science and application of statistics, and promoting use and awareness for public benefit'. A busy site that I've never found to be very useful. Others may disagree.

Conclusion

This is only a start to the list. I'll update it when I get the time and if I find any other sites. There are a few blogs I want to put on here and some of the more general mathematical sites and other statistical software package websites. I'm getting tired of writing statistics though so, all in good time.

If there are any that you think should be added then stick them in a comment.