Choosing a DDI Product

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is a suite of products that describes metadata about both quantitative and qualitative research data in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. The DDI suite is a set of free standards that document and manage different stages of the research data lifecycle, including conceptualization, collection, process, distribution, discovery, and archiving.

The content areas of DDI cover the following areas:

• Conceptual objects: concept, unit, unit type, universe, population, geographic structures, and representation
• Methodological objects: approaches to sample selection, data capture, weighting, quality control, and process management
• Processing: data capture, data processing, analysis, and data management
• Quantitative and qualitative data objects: concept, universe, representation, usage, data type, record, record relationships, storage, access, and descriptive statistics
• Data management: ownership, access, rights management, restrictions, quality standards, organization, agent management, relationship between products, versioning, and provenance

Products within the DDI suite differ in terms of their area of coverage within DDI, supported activities, and required level of infrastructure. From simple descriptive content for human understanding to structures that support metadata-driven statistics production and analysis, DDI addresses a broad area of data management needs. As a suite of standards, DDI provides a common means of identification for information objects, support for common cross-product content, and an informed means of transforming content between products.

The DDI Alliance continues to develop new products to meet the needs of current and potential user group. These are proposed by members and supported by contributed work and funding from the Alliance as agreed to by the Executive Board. New products may be used to expand the coverage of existing DDI products or be published as stand-alone products that address a need in the DDI Community.

The following table indicates the general coverage of each product. Select the product name for a complete product description.