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Here are two examples from the General Social Survey Codebook: In these instances, you will only need to know the column locations of the variables you want. In many instances, the data file will have one record per observation.

The column and line location of the variables in the file.

This is common when a person refuses or cannot answer a question, but an interviewer can answer for them. Flags perform a function similar to weights in the they tell you if and when a special procedure was used to create the variable. These weights are determined by the sampling procedure used to collect the data. Sometimes, in order to properly analyze the data, you will need to apply weights to certain variables. A survey that was conducted to measure national attitudes toward a subject may not be good for assessing those same attitudes in specific states. Also, subtle differences in wording can mean very big changes in how you interpret your results. In a study that is done repeatedly, the questions asked and the answers allowed can change considerably from one 'wave' to the next, not to mention that some are dropped and new ones added.

The wording and presence of the questions and answers.

Text of the questions and responses: some even have how many people responded a particular way.īefore you decide on a particular dataset, there are some things you need to verify before you can make good use of the data:.

Details about the data: columns in which specific variables can be found, whether they are character or numeric, and if numeric, what format.

Structure of the data within the file: hierarchical, multiple cards, etc.

Technical information about the files themselves: number of observations, record length, number of records per observation, etc.

Sampling information: what was the population studied, how was the sample drawn, what was the response rate.

Description of the study: who did it, why they did it, how they did it.

Like any other kind of 'book,' some codebooks are better than others.

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It describes how the data are arranged in the computer file or files, what the various numbers and letters mean, and any special instructions on how to use the data properly. A codebook is a technical description of the data that was collected for a particular purpose. Now that we know what a data file is, we can make more sense out of what a codebook is.

This is particularly true for files that have information from the same observation for several years. If a survey had more questions than could fit on one card, then researchers had to continue the data on another card. This is a hold-over from the early days of computing when all the data were entered on punch cards which had only 80 columns. Often, though, a data file will have more than one line of data for each observation. The two examples above have one 'line,' 'record,' or 'card' of data for each observation. This is the simplest format of a data file and most will come like this. This, among many other important things, is found in the codebook. Since the information in the data file are all run together you need some way of determining where one variable ends and the next one starts. If you look closely, you can see that the actual numbers and letters are the same in both files. In this example, column A in the spreadsheet is column 1 in the data file, column B is columns 2-3, column C is columns 4-8, and column D is columns 9-14.

The first line of numbers isn't actually part of the data, we've put it there so you can see how the columns in a data file relate to the columns in a spreadsheet.