Quick Guides – Results and Analysis

This guide tells you how to display and interpret the results of a search.

The Parlianet service gives you a wide range of display and analysis options for the results of your searches. The display options will be of interest to all users and the analysis options will provide very useful opportunities for those looking to do more detailed research. For instance, using the analysis options you could produce graphs showing the number of questions asked of different Government departments over several sessions or Parliaments. Or you could analyse topics of interest by party, gender of MP or constituency.

For the purposes of this guide we will use the PQ wizard to look for parliamentary questions relating to education:

First select the Search Wizards option from the left-hand menu. You will then need to specify the United Kingdom legislature, and select the Parliamentary Questions wizard. Type "education" in the Free Text field and click "Go".

List the documents found

After each search, the total number of documents found is listed on the Results page. This page also lists the following options:

• List documents in "Date", "Member, Date" or "Type, Date" order – discussed in this section
• Choose a display type – see the Analysis of Results section in this guide
• Save current search – discussed in the Saved Searches Guide (to be written soon)
• Return to search page – to refine current search or perform a new search

Click the first option – "List documents in Date order" – to list all documents in reverse chronological order.

For each document the Date, Session, Document Type and first few lines of the question are shown. Because our search on education was very general, the results include all document types, such as Oral Questions, Lords Questions and Private Notice Questions, from the current session. Of course, you can refine your searches to a much greater extent.

Clicking on any of the links on the Results page takes you to the full text of the document. To get back to your list of documents just click "List" at the top of the page. You can also select one or more documents to print or download by checking the boxes by the side of each result profile.

Sorting of results

This section describes how to sort your Document List, which is currently displayed in reverse chronological order. You may want to sort your results if you have a large number of documents in your results list or if the alternative default options given earlier ("Member, Date" or "Type, Date") are not suitable.

As an example of how to sort your document list in a different way, select "Breakdown" at the top of your list of search results. This brings you to the Breakdown Settings screen.

You can sort your list by up to three criteria or levels. The drop-down menus in each of the three levels contain all of the fields available for selection. Just click the "Level 1" box to see which fields are available to sort your results.

In Level 1 select "Member" and click "Go".

You will notice that the list of results is now sorted alphabetically by member.

You can order the results exactly the way you want by selecting any number of Levels from one to three. Try setting Level 1 to "Party", Level 2 to "Type" and Level 3 to "Member" and then click "Go".

Should you wish to increase or decrease the number of items displayed in each category, return to the Breakdown Settings screen and type the number required in the "Sub Items" box.

By typing "2" in the Sub Items box for both levels 2 and 3 and clicking on "Go" you will notice that only the first two items are shown in each category. If there are more than five items in any category the words "More" and/or "Remaining n items" appears at the end of the list, where n is the number of items not shown. Click "More" to see 5 more items; click "Remaining" to see all of the items

Analysis of Results

If you wish to perform a more statistical analysis of your search results you need to select "Display" at the top of the page. You can do this either from the initial Results screen or the Breakdown Settings screen. These options allow you to turn the raw data of your results into meaningful and presentable reports.

There are five ways of analysing your results:

• Document List – which we have already discussed in the previous section
• Item Counts – presents your results numerically in a spreadsheet
• Bar Chart – displays your results graphically
• Pie Chart – displays your results graphically
• Line Chart – displays your results graphically

Count your results

Item Counts are used to count the items in each of the categories you have selected for sorting your results. Selecting this option generates a spreadsheet. For example, select "Item Counts" and still with Level 1 set to "Party", Level 2 to "Type" and Level 3 to "Member", click "Go".

Using the Cut-off options

If you find that the spreadsheet is cluttered with items that have a low frequency count you can choose to omit results below a certain threshold. If you specify a number in one or more of the Level Min boxes, then this will suppress any totals below this number. For example, go back to the Breakdown Settings, enter "20" in the Member Min box (Level 3) and click "Go". Now if there were only 19 questions asked by John Austin, then this MP would not be included in your chart. You can also omit results above a certain threshold, by specifying a number in one or more of the Level Max boxes.

You can specify different minimum and maximum cut-offs for each Level, and you may also use percentages, for example by typing 20% instead of 20.

Alternatively, you can specify a minimum number in the "Unit Cutoff" box. This applies to individual bars in the chart. For example, if you specify "2", and there was only one written question by a particular MP, then that value would not be present on the chart.

Please note that these are the results at the time of writing. The data are continually changing and the resulting graphs and charts will not look exactly like those included in this guide.

The item counts data are available to download as a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file. This type of file can be imported into most spreadsheet programs. If you wish to download your item count, just click "Download", and you can either download the information directly as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or save it as a .CSV file.

Show a two level count graphically

Trends within data become clearer if you select a graphical display. Select "Display" from the top of the page and select "Bar Chart". Because you can only have two breakdown levels for bar charts and line charts, you are presented with the Breakdown Settings screen. Remove the Min cutoff value of 2 from Level 2 and click "Go" to produce the following graph:

Alternatively you can use the line chart. Click "Display" and select "Line Chart". Please note that for Line Charts the first breakdown level has to be a date, so select "Date" for Level 1 and change Level 2 to "Party". Then click "Go":

How many questions have been asked on a number of different subjects to do with education?

To find this out you do not need to redo the search, just sort your results in a different way and use the "Subject Terms" field. Click "Display" at the top of the page and, this time, select Pie Chart. You will now see the Breakdown Settings screen again because the Pie Chart supports only one breakdown level. Set this level to "Subject Terms" and the Unit Cutoff to "40". This gives the following result:

In order to display the total number in each category select "Chart" from the top of the page. Tick the "Include Totals" box and click "Go". The total number of documents in each category is now shown in the key to the pie chart.

You should now be ready to sort and analyse all your search results.

Last updated 3rd December 2001