Where will DDI-Documented Data Come From?

Tom Piazza
Senior Survey Statistician
Survey Research Center, CSM Program, University of California, Berkeley 


The only people currently planning to document data using the XML
standard of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) are a few of the
data archives.  Eventually, however, the survey organizations that
produce data will have to be the ones to do it.  How will that happen?
In the short term, we need to provide helpful tools, so that it will
become feasible for data producers to do "the right thing." One tool
that I will describe is a set of procedures for documenting computer
assisted survey instruments.  Those procedures can be extended to
generate DDI for computer assisted interviews and even computer
assisted data entry.  In the longer term, we may reach the point at
which funding agencies, especially the National Science Foundation,
require that data files produced through their funding be documented in
accordance with DDI standards.