[DDI-users] Translation tools/processes from syntax files to DDICodebook

[Hrudey, E.J.]

Thanks for sharing your R package, Adrian, and for starting the conversation, Wendy.

Re: the original question-I used NESSTAR and uploaded the data files I had (in this case SPSS, but it works with STATA too). NESSTAR automatically uploads the existing metadata from the dataset, but there is still a lot of manual work to do if the questionnaire had conditional questions/routing. NESSTAR is nice in that you can add additional information or include question text that is longer than the standard variable label, but everything is manual so it takes a lot of work.

@Adrian-with your R package, is it designed solely to translate existing labeled data into a codebook or is it possible to add and modify the metadata (e.g. with NESSTAR there was the possible of providing additional information about routing)? And can is be used to convert data formats other than STATA?

On a general note, after the time I spent working in NESSTAR and comparing it to Colectica, it seems to me it would be more efficient if the questions in a survey could be marked up at the level of the survey itself (to allow for capturing additional text or routing that cannot be readily included in the labels of the dataset variables). I think that’s what the Colectica Designer tool aims to do, but the problem is that while it allows you to design a survey in Designer and then export that marked-up survey to be uploaded into a survey tool, there are only a handful of survey tools that can utilize this exported marked-up survey. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple for my institution to just switch to another survey tool (we use Qualtrics), so I’m not sure how we can best create marked-up surveys that can be reused and that should make the process of creating a DDI codebook easier, without requiring researchers to create the survey two times: once in a DDI tool like Colectica and once in the survey tool itself.
Has anyone else had this experience?

Sincerely,

Jessica


From: <ddi-users-bounces at icpsr.umich.edu> on behalf of Adrian Dușa <dusa.adrian at unibuc.ro>
Reply-To: Data Documentation Initiative Users Group <ddi-users at icpsr.umich.edu>
Date: Friday, April 23, 2021 at 10:58 PM
To: Data Documentation Initiative Users Group <ddi-users at icpsr.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [DDI-users] Translation tools/processes from syntax files to DDICodebook

I have an R package that can do that out of the box. The command is as simple as:
convert("yourfile.dta", to = "DDI")

The latest development version depends on another R package called "haven", which (in its latest development version but yet not published on CRAN) can read and write Stata style defined missing values such as .a, .b etc.
In the XML codebook file, they are automatically (and consistently across all variables) replaced with negative numbers such as -1, -2 etc.

Both development versions can be installed from GitHub, using:

library(remotes)
install_github("tidyverse/haven")
install_github("dusadrian/DDIwR")

I'd be happy to be of assistance in case you need any help.

I hope this helps,
Adrian

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 9:23 PM Wendy Thomas <wlt at umn.edu<mailto:wlt at umn.edu>> wrote:
I had this question within another conversation recently and was wondering what people were using and if there were any new tools out there.

"While I have your attention: what is the process of creating the DDI codebooks based on existing data sets? Suppose I have a labeled data set in Stata, what would I need to do to produce a DDI codebook XML file out if it? "

Answer to the list. I'll compile and I'm sure others are interested.

Wendy

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Wendy L. Thomas                              Phone: +1 612.624.4389
Data Access Core Director                 Fax:   +1 612.626.8375
Minnesota Population Center             Email: wlt at umn.edu<mailto:wlt at umn.edu>
University of Minnesota
50 Willey Hall
225 19th Avenue South
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Adrian Dusa
University of Bucharest
Romanian Social Data Archive
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