RIDIR: Survey Data Recycling: New Analytic Framework, Integrated Database, and Tools for Cross-national Social, Behavioral and Economic Research

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Professionals and academic researchers in universities, government, the corporate world, and NGOs need timely access to the wealth of existing international survey data. Currently these data are difficult to use in an integrated fashion because they are not directly comparable. This project addresses this problem by developing a harmonized database derived from over 3,000 national surveys administered over 5 decades to more than 3.5 million respondents from over 150 countries. The database contains measures of social capital, wellbeing, and political participation. Indicators of demographic, political, and economic aspects of the countries at the time respondents were interviewed complement information about individuals. These products will facilitate the integrated and efficient use of extant international social survey data by a wide range of social actors. The Survey Data Recycling Project (SDR) enables innovative data-intensive research on major substantive topics of social science interest and advances the fields of comparative methodology and of survey data harmonization. There are two main contributions. First, the SDR project builds theory-informed big data that allow users to overcome limitations of space and time coverage inherent in separate international survey projects. The SDR database provides individual-level harmonized subjective measures from 24 international survey projects, including the World Values Survey, the International Social Survey Program, the European Social Survey, Eurobarometer and its regional editions from 1966 together with metadata as variables describing both source data quality and harmonization procedures. The second contribution is a battery of new analytical tools that researchers can use to assess our harmonization effort and to analyze multi-dimensional data structures stemming from ex-post survey harmonization, including the SDR database. The project's portal provides access to the database and the analytical tools facilitating data evaluation, visualization, analysis, and extraction. The new framework for data recycling that we develop integrates previously separate strands of survey methodology and constructs measures of source data quality, and control indicators for ex-post harmonization. The metadata allow scholars to account for biases and errors produced in the harmonization lifecycle that runs from obtaining the source data, to creating the target variables, and cleaning and checking the integrated data files. The project is governed by a professional oversight committee and maintains strong communication with the international survey research community to promote improvements of, and access to its products. The SDR project creates a new research paradigm for a unified theoretically-informed and methodologically advanced approach to ex-post harmonization of cross-national survey data accessible to multiple types of users.