Registration is open for the 14th Annual European DDI (EDDI) conference which will take place this year in Paris, France from 28 November - 1 December 2022.
About EDDI
EDDI is the annual conference for users of DDI – Data Documentation Initiative -, a metadata specification for the social, economic, and behavioral sciences. It is run by GESIS and the IDSC of IZA under the auspices of the DDI Alliance.
EDDI is designed to provide forum where DDI users from Europe and the world can gather to showcase their work and their progress toward DDI adoption, as well as discuss any questions or challenges they may have about the standard.
EDDI includes presentations, poster sessions, and discussion sessions. The conference closes with a “meet the experts” session in which users will have a chance to lobby for their point of view with representatives from the Technical Committee of the DDI Alliance. The philosophy of EDDI is to be an open, inclusive DDI community-building activity. The conference including related meetings usually spans a week in early December in a different European country each year.
About the conference
EDDI22 is organized jointly by CDSP, Center for Socio-Political Data, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA – International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.
It will be hosted by Sciences Po at held at in their buidlings at Rue Saint-Peres, in the Saint Germain district, Paris, from Tuesday 29 November 2022 to Thursday 1 December 2022. Online participation will also be available for those unable to travel.
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.
The meeting will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world.
CLOSER’s presence at EDDI22
The CLOSER team will run a workshop and present papers and a poster at this year’s EDDI conference. Please see below for further details.
Tuesday 29 November 2022, 10:00 – 16:00 CET
Workshop Questionnaires – Jon Johnson and Hayley Mills
In 2014, DDI Lifecycle 3.2 introduced a robust schema for managing and documenting full questionnaires, further improvements have been added in DDI-L 3.3 such as the ability to support measurements.
Since then, many organisations have adopted the standard and started implementing questionnaire and question documentation as an integral part of capturing the data lifecycle. The development of software tools has built up substantial community knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of the current version of the DDI-Lifecycle standard.
The workshop will be an opportunity for those using and developing software to create and reuse questions and questionnaires to discuss their experiences and bring together that knowledge to:
- Develop best practice for implementation
- Develop best practice for interchange
- Provide ideas for revisions, extensions, and feed into future versions of DDI
Thursday 1 December, 10:45 – 12:00 CET
Question: How do we document validated questionnaires and their usage? – Hayley Mills
Validated questionnaires (or standardised scales) are a set of question items designed to quantify one or more indirectly measured concepts. They are validated to ensure researchers can reliably measure the same concept across samples, and over time.
For intra- and inter-study comparison, it is valuable to know where and when validated questionnaires have been used and how. Metadata for this can be difficult to obtain as information is often distributed across multiple sources and little information is available about where the questions have been used.
CLOSER aims to make this information more easily accessible by adding validated questionnaires to CLOSER Discovery (discovery.closer.ac.uk), and moreover, link the question items to where they have been used.
This presentation will set out how CLOSER intends to use DDI, to structure this metadata within CLOSER Discovery and the Colectica repository. It will detail the considerations and reasoning used to find a workable solution; however, we would value input on whether this is the optimal approach.
Thursday 1 December, 13:00 – 13:45 CET
Poster presentation – In search of standardised scales – Becky Oldroyd
Standardised scales (also known as summated scales or validated questionnaires) are a group of related questions that measure an underlying concept (e.g., wellbeing, relationship satisfaction, self-esteem). These scales are frequently used in quantitative research because they allow researchers to reliably measure the same concept across samples and over time. Metadata for standardised scales (e.g., title, author, questions) can be difficult to obtain as information is often scattered across multiple sources, and permission is sometimes required to access the scale. Some scales have multiple variants (i.e., versions which include a smaller subset of questions), and information about the original scale may be hard to locate. It is also challenging to find information about where these scales have been used in research studies.
CLOSER aims to make this information more easily accessible to researchers by adding standardised scale metadata to the DDI-compliant platform CLOSER Discovery. The first step in this process included gathering metadata for several of the standardised scales used by the CLOSER studies and displaying these on the CLOSER Technical Wiki: https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/display/CLOS/Scales.
This poster will highlight the importance of standardised scale metadata, the steps taken to create this metadata, and the progress made.
Free online training: Introduction to DDI
CLOSER’s Dr Hayley Mills will join the team delivering this free tutorial taught as a precursor to the EDDI 2022 conference.
The training event introduces DDI and describes the major specifications, DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle, as well as the upcoming DDI Cross Domain Integration. In addition, DDI tool demonstrations will show how DDI can be used in practice.
This is a free, virtual event and is open to anyone who is interested.
- Registration before the event is required via the EDDI 2022 registration process. https://eddi22.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/5
- Registration for the tutorial closes on 22 November 2022
Overview of the Session and Introduction
Speakers: Libby Bishop (GESIS) & Wolfgang Zenk-Molton (GESIS)
DDI Specifications
This session will introduce the different specifications and how each of these can be used to describe important metadata for different purposes.
- DDI Codebook – Katja Molainen (Finnish Social Science Data Archive)
DDI Codebook is a metadata specification for providing detailed, machine-actionable and human-readable metadata about individual studies and their data files in an XML format. - DDI Lifecycle – Hayley Mills (CLOSER)
DDI Lifecycle addresses the needs of metadata management not only for archives and data disseminators, but also throughout the data lifecycle, from data collection and survey design through the end stages. - DDI Cross-Domain – Arofan Gregory (CODATA)
DDI Cross-Domain Integration is a forthcoming standard which is intended to complement other metadata specifications – notably DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle – by making it possible to share and reuse data across domain boundaries and within and between research infrastructures.
DDI Tools demonstrations
This session will provide an overview of many of the tools and service providers available to those who are interested in actively implementing DDI. The intention is to help users understand what tools and services exist for the different specifications, and who they should talk to in order to learn more.
Further information
Please visit the EDDI conference website for further information including the provisional programme and details on how to register.