[DDI-users] Re: Adding tags to the DDI

[Richard C. Rockwell]

Andrew, as I read your message, it seems to me that you are asking a 
question entirely different from the two answers that have (so far) been 
posted.  Your question seems to me to arise from survey research rather 
than from information science or even from the details of the DDI and XML.

I think that you are asking about what survey researchers know as "skip 
patterns," in which some characteristic of a question (which is almost but 
not entirely equivalent to a "variable") is contingent upon the response to 
another question.  The most common characteristic concerns whether the 
question is asked or not.

An example is found in a specific GSS series of questions.  The first 
element in the series is the question "Are you a citizen of [the United 
States]?".  If the answer is "Yes," the interview then proceeds to "Were 
you born in [the United States]?".  If the answer to the question is "No" 
then and only then is this question asked "What citizenship do you 
hold?".  Then "No" respondents are also asked about their country of birth, 
returning to the normal flow of the questionnaire.

Skip patterns can be considerably more complicated than this, including 
contingency on the values of two or more variables.  Even the question text 
can be contingent on the answer to a preceding question, although so far we 
don't see that frequently.

At the moment the DDI handles only the simplest of skip patterns, with 
"come from" and "go to" elements.  This might suffice, Andrew, to meet your 
needs of the moment.

The Expert and Steering Committtes are aware that much more is needed in 
order for the DDI to be capable of documenting the increasingly complex 
instruments used in various forms of Computer Assisted Interviewing.  Your 
ideas concerning what a future release of the DDI should be capable of 
documenting would be most welcome.

("At 02:10 PM 1/19/2004 -0700, Andrew L Arnott wrote:

>I m fairly new to DDI, and moderately new to XML schemas.  I am using the 
>DDI 2.0 schema (XSD) file to validate incoming DDI files on the web.  My 
>problem is that DDI (apparently) does not have tags to make some variables 
>conditional on the values of other variables.  I have tried to write 
>another schema and do something like this:
>
><ddi:var ID= V1 &>
>
>             <myExt:if var= v5 equals= 1 />
>
>             <labl>&</labl>
>
></ddi:var>
>
>
>
>But the DDI schema doesn t allow for unknown elements, I guess.  Can 
>anyone suggest how I can get around this problem?  If you know a different 
>approach to my problem, I d be very open to it.
>
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>Andrew Arnott
>_______________________________________________
>DDI-users mailing list
>DDI-users at icpsr.umich.edu
>http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/mailman/listinfo/ddi-users

--------------------------------------
Richard C. ROCKWELL
Executive Director, The Roper Center &
Institute for Social Inquiry
Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut
341 Mansfield Road, U-164
Storrs, CT 06269-1164  USA
V +1 860 486-4440
F +1 860 486-6308
Richard.Rockwell at uconn.edu
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