How Do We Manage Complex Questions in the Context of the Large-Scale Ingest of Legacy Paper Questionnaires into DDI Lifecycle?

The Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) and the CLOSER (Cohorts and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources) project are in the early phase of a large scale metadata ingest programme, largely from historic paper questionnaires. The ultimate goal of the project is a Unified Search Platform (USP) which will make the metadata of 9 of the UK’s birth cohort studies available and searchable online. Part of the building blocks of the project is an in-house editor used to capture the metadata. While DDI3.2 certainly seems to offer enough flexibility to handle most of the complex or tabular questions encountered in the legacy questionnaires, the finite scope of the editor and the skill level of its intended users lead us to constrain the DDI3.2 profile we intend to use. How we design the core structure of this editor and which DDI3.2 profile we implement in order to deal with complex questions has a wide range of repercussions for the rest of the project infrastructure. Our choices will affect issues such as how far we will be able to remain sufficiently true to the original questionnaires, how efficiently the searching of the USP will operate, how easy it will be to assign concepts, mappings and comparison schemes and, more generally, the consistency of the metadata across surveys. These repercussions need to be examined in order to weigh up our preferred options.