Survey CTRL and DDI: Surveycodings

The surveycodings.org website is a free to use repository and service that disseminates long lists of classified and translated imported socio economic indicators as job titles, educational attainment and industries. These lists are used by all major studies, to have a comparable set of strings that tools like an auto suggest or trigram search can be built against. This makes it easier to incorporate classify ones indicator during an interview by an interview as well as the self-identification of these indicators by respondents. Furthermore the surveycodings website provides background information, coding examples and is the place to download source code, the lists can be exported in DDI format. A classification management system is built on the backend, to allow classification experts to maintain the lists. In parallel with the SERISS (Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences) project CentERdata has compiled a suite of tools called Survey CTRL to fully support the survey life cycle, containing new tools as well as improved existing ones. The strength of this approach is to view a survey design process as iterative. CentERdata provides the tools to solidify and speed up this process, as well as safeguarding and collecting data on each step. To support existing questionnaire development work processes the tools were designed independently. DDI helps in the communication between the Survey CTRL tools, but also makes it easier to integrate into existing DDI compatible work processes.