Professor Angela Dale is Director of the ESRC’s Research Methods Programme. She is also director of the Census Microdata Unit, providing samples of microdata from the 1991 and 2001 censuses and responsible for the arm of the Economic and Social Data Service concerned with large scale government surveys. Until 2002 she was director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester. The centre, launched in 1995, is multidisciplinary and combines methodological and substantive research as well as running a PhD and MSc programme in Research Methods and Statistics.