[DDI-CDG] List of studies and examples of scenarios

[Oliver Watteler]

Dear CDG,

I am finally able to send out the two things we agreed on at the end of 
our last conference call. We said that we will continue our work once we 
get a hold of the draft for DDI 3, but this does not work. DDI's XML 
developer needs our scenarios first to fill in some gaps. Well then, 
here we go. I have attached the following documents:

1. A list of "comparative" studies that also contains Reto's 
nomenclature as far as I have understood it. Wendy has also drafted a 
list of comparative studies in form of a table and I will fit "my" 
studies into her list in order to get an overview of comparative or 
comparable surveys that are out there.
This list has to be enhanced by you. Are you interested in the 
methodological information I used (mostly from the different web-sites)?

2. Some examples of scenarios where information is being compared. When 
we talked about those scenarios, my understanding was that we want to 
break down the study life cycle phases to the working steps and do not 
want to stay on the general level of theoretical or methodological 
comparison. We want do go down to the single information level also to 
see what can already be documented with the current DDI and what is 
still missing.
I attached a list of four tables, which have to be read as follows. The 
aim should be to come up with a complete description of a comparative 
study’s life cycle that shows all working steps at a level where they 
match information bits that in turn can be fit into DDI tags. Now, the 
tables you see contain some of those single steps and not entire cycle 
phase. Thus, my example 1 only talks about the agreement on questions 
that serve as indicators. Of course phase 1, which is called “Concept” 
in the DDI life cycle model, also implies the gathering of information 
(e.g. literature), the drafting of hypothesis or the “assembly” of a 
questionnaire. Those would be other working steps I could think of and 
they too could be fit into tables.
One thing that we do not want to do, I suppose, is to go through the 
development process of DDI 1 once again and think of all those things 
that could possibly be compared, but stick to the real world and think 
of the information bits which are really held against each other.

Talking to Meinhard about the examples I realized that this lengthy 
explanation was necessary. Maybe it would also be useful to insert the 
existing DDI tags that are useful for comparison into tables like the 
ones presented. What do you think?
The list of studies could be used to see how those studies could be 
marked up with DDI (as has already been done in some case and has also 
been discussed in the context of best practise examples).

To talk about the time frame. We will meet in Edinburgh on May, 22nd. We 
should organize at least one more confernece call before that and try to 
come up with as many scenarios as possible. I will take up the job to 
compile them afterwards. Any other things you can thinks of that need to 
be done?

Have a nice week-end,
yours Oliver.

P.S.: Wendy! Thanks for the information. I will send around your 
enhanced table next week.

-- 

GESIS - Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (ZA)
   Oliver Watteler, M.A.

   Dokumentation und Archivierung
  /Documentation and Archiving

   Bachemer Str.40
   50931 Köln
   Tel.:++49-221-47694-76
   FAX :++49-221-47694-44
   Web :http://www.gesis.org/za



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