Enhancing Social Science Data Infrastructure: Upgrade of Metadata Documenting Cross-National Microdata

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SES -1225596Janet GornickCUNY Graduate CenterABSTRACTEnhancing Social Science Data Infrastructure: Upgrade of Metadata Documenting Cross-National MicrodataLIS serves as a unique data archive and research center. It provides researchers from multiple fields access to household- and person-level data ("microdata") from high- and middle-income countries around the world. To that end, the LIS staff gathers nationally-representative datasets from many countries and harmonizes them into two distinct databases: the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, which is focused on income microdata, and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, which contains wealth microdata. These databases facilitate and promote high-quality cross-national comparative research. Most researchers use the LIS databases to analyze variation across countries in socio-economic outcomes, primarily poverty and income inequality, wealth and debt holdings, and employment and earnings patterns. Many LIS-based studies focus on the impact of public policies and other national institutions on these outcomes. LIS also maintains a massive collection of explanatory documentation ("metadata"), which describes the original data sources and data collection practices, as well as the decisions made by the LIS staff during the process of preparing and harmonizing the data. These metadata document the quality of the LIS data, and are critical for making the data harmonization process transparent to the many data users. The work carried out by the LIS staff -- acquiring, harmonizing, and making the microdata available, and preparing and providing the metadata -- saves many months of data acquisition and preparation time for the researchers who use the data. NSF support for this project permits LIS staff to design and create a metadata repository. It will replace the current metadata storage system, which lacks a search function, with a sophisticated searchable database that will enable users to search the LIS and LWS metadata more easily. The repository will have a back-end populating feature (to be used by the LIS data staff) and a front-end search function (to be used by LIS data users). Broader impactsFor nearly 30 years, LIS has provided access to cross-national microdata that are otherwise difficult to obtain. This has spurred the development of a vast body of comparative research on socio-economic outcomes, carried out by economists, sociologists, and other social scientists around the world. This infrastructure project will produce a searchable metadata system, which will assist the LIS data team as it continues to harmonize and document microdata from a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse set of countries. For the thousands of researchers who already work with the LIS and LWS data, this project will enable them to use both the microdata and the metadata more quickly and more accurately. The new infrastructure will also facilitate the use of the LIS and LWS microdata by new research communities, thereby promoting innovative social science research.