Presentation,
Provide, Enrich and Make Accessible
(2013)
Abstract
The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) is ascending as one of Germany’s major pub-
lisher of Scientific Use Data for educational research. Disseminating data from six panel co-
horts makes not only structured data edition, but also documentation and user support a major
challenge.
In order to accomplish this task, NEPS Data Center has implemented a sophisticated metadata
system. This merely allows the structured documentation of survey instruments’ and data
files’ metadata. It rather allows to enrich the Scientific Use Files disseminated with further
information, significantly easing access for data analyses. As a result, NEPS not only provides
bi-lingual dataset files (German and English). Beyond that, the data user can instantly see—
for instance—the exact wording of the question leading to data in a distinct variable without
leaving the dataset. To achieve this, structured metadata information is attached to the data
using Stata’s characteristics functionality.
To make handling this additional metadata even easier, NEPS Data Center provides a package
of user-written programs, “NEPStools”, to the data users. The presentation will cover an intro-
duction to the NEPS data preparation workflow, focussing on the metadata system and its role
in enriching the Scientific Use Data using Stata ’s capabilities. Afterwards, “NEPStools” will
be introduced.
