MetaDater's perspective on cross-national and diachronic data release_ocbprwo4qrgebhct5xmzgoc22i

Abstract

For a long time, the data documentation standards have been limited to the description of cross-section studies. To some extent, this documentation schema can also be used for cross-national studies, as far as the latter take the form of a well known integrated dataset. The increasing importance of some cross-national projects in the last twenty years or so (Eurobarometer, ISSP, ESS etc.) raises nevertheless new expectations. The DDI-Alliance has created a special expert group to handle those questions. The CSDI (Comparative Survey Design and Implementation Network) works on quality standards for cross-national studies, of which detailed documentation is an important component. For the EU funded MetaDater project, working on a metadata management and production system, the repeated cross-national study was selected as the highest complexity to be handled in the data model and the application. The following questions must be answered in this perspective: * Is the ambition to describe with more appropriate categories the well known integrated data file or to document each of the country specific datasets? * If one chooses to document the single components of the cross-national study, a new question raises: how will the whole set of single cross-sections be described? Defining the whole as a 'collection' of cross-sections can do it; a more promising way would consist in relating organically questions and variables in those datasets, which are related over space or through time. If this network of relationships between questions, resp. variables, is established carefully, it can be used to support the process of integration of country specific datasets. At the end of the process, the questions and variables in the integrated dataset are related to the questions and variables in the integrated national cross-sections. This information can be fed into any standard publication of the metadata for the whole project, making it possible to navigate through the whole project.
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