International Passenger Survey, 2002

The <i>International Passenger Survey</i> (IPS) aims to collect data on both credits and debits for the travel account of the Balance of Payments, provide detailed visit information on overseas visitors to the United Kingdom (UK) for tourism policy, and collect data on international migration.<br> The depositor recommends that only expert users who are familiar with the coding and weighting structures use this dataset as limited support is available. Some considerable understanding of the data is required before meaningful analyses can be made, and care must be taken when performing time series operations as codes can vary from year to year. Not all variables from one years dataset are used in other years.<br><br>The data comprises five files, ALCOHOL, AIRMILES, QREGTOWN and QCONTACT with four quarters per file and SPORT, where one file covers all four quarters. These can be joined together using the variables YEAR, SERIAL, FLOW and QUARTER. <br><br>The weighting of IPS data is complex and done in several stages. When working with the system weights, great care should be taken to read the documentation concerning weighting procedures as not all records are treated in exactly the same way.<br>