Featured Adopters
Center for Hispanic Americans Research Methods (CHARM)
DDI Lifecycle 3.2
Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA)
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The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) offers a data catalogue providing access to research data from archives across Europe. The catalogue includes nearly 30,000 studies (~22,000 with english descriptions) distributed by members of the CESSDA European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).
The major objective for CESSDA is to provide seamless access to data across repositories, nations, languages and research purposes. CESSDA encourages standardisation of data and metadata, data sharing and knowledge mobility across Europe. CESSDA aims to play an active part in the development of standards and, even more important, to encourage and facilitate the use of metadata standards for documenting and publishing the existing inventories of research data available from national as well as cross-national resources in Europe.
CLOSER - Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London
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The CLOSER (Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources) programme aims to maximise the use, value and impact of the member UK longitudinal studies. A key part of the CLOSER project is the creation of a Uniform Search Platform allowing users to search the metadata from all of the projects included to find key variables for their research. The metadata will be substantially enhanced and made available in DDI-Lifecycle format. It will be harmonised both across the sweeps within the studies and across the studies, allowing people to find equivalent information. This rich resource will then be available to all researchers, backed by a programme of training and capacity building and a number of sample cross-cohort projects. CLOSER is planning for users throughout their educational journey, as well as policy makers and other users who are not as well served by current provision.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
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An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR provides all of its metadata records in DDI format. About 75 percent of the holdings also have DDI-compliant variable-level information.
International Household Survey Network (IHSN)
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The IHSN program of activities includes:
- Improvement of data collection methods and practices through assessment and improvement of survey methods and programs. The IHSN facilitates the work of experts and specialized task forces who produce guidelines and reference materials. The IHSN also develops and maintains a Question Bank, a central repository of international survey guidelines, definitions of related concepts and indicators, interviewer instructions, and classifications.
- Development and maintenance of tools and guidelines to help data producers improve the documentation, preservation, anonymization, cataloguing, dissemination, and archiving of survey and census microdata.
- Maintenance of survey and census catalogs to inform data users about the existence of data. The IHSN does not distribute microdata, but helps make these data more accessible by providing data documentation, cataloguing, and dissemination tools and recommendations to agencies that own such data.
DDI is used by participating data producers to catalog and document data -- see the IHSN Survey Catalog. The IHSN coordinates its activities with the Accelerated Data Program (ADP), which supports the implementation of international best practices of survey design and data archiving in developing countries.
Mid-Life in the United States (MIDUS)
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Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) is a national longitudinal study of health and well-being at the University of Wisconsin, Institute on Aging. It was conceived by a multidisciplinary team of scholars interested in understanding aging as an integrated bio-psycho-social process. Since its inception in 1995 MIDUS has continued to grow, such that it now includes data from over 10,000 individuals, comprising thousands of variables in different scientific areas among distinct cohorts.
This website is a one-stop repository that provides MIDUS data and metadata (information about data) for exploration and analysis. Users can read project abstracts, search for variables within or across datasets, download instruments, documentation, and codebooks, and download datasets from the official MIDUS archive.
The MIDUS study and this repository are supported by multiple grants from the National Institute on Aging (5R37AG027343, 5P01AG020166, 1R03AG046312) and by the University of Wisconsin Institute on Aging. This repository is based on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata standard and is powered by Colectica software. Please feel free to explore the repository and send any feedback or questions to bradler@wisc.edu.
The Dataverse project
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The Dataverse Project is a community and an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others work. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit.
A Dataverse repository hosts multiple Dataverse collections. Each Dataverse collection contains datasets or other collections, and each dataset contains descriptive metadata and data files (including documentation and code that accompany the data).
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University leads the development of the Dataverse software.
Vietnam Era Twins Study of Aging (VETSA)
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The VETSA is a nationwide longitudinal project designed to examine genetic and environmental influences on late midlife cognitive and brain changes. Starting in 2002, the baseline VETSA assessment conducted in-person testing of a community-dwelling sample of 1237 male twins ages 51-60 including a five- year follow-up completed in 2013. The project is unique in its inclusion of an in depth cognitive battery, magnetic resonance imaging data, neuroendocrine data, biomedical, biomarker, and psychosocial measures in the same middle-aged adults in the context of a behavior genetic study.
VETSA is applying DDI-Lifecycle to document project-connected materials (e.g., procedures, codebooks, scoring systems, measures, variable definitions, statistical syntax, and datasets) and to facilitate interactive use by other researchers.