| NSF Org: |
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 10, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 28, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1738502 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sara Kiesler
skiesler@nsf.gov (703)292-8643 SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,402,259.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,402,259.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1960 KENNY RD COLUMBUS OH US 43210-1016 (614)688-8735 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
Mershon Center for International Columbus OH US 43201-2602 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Sociology, Methodology, Measuremt & Stats, Political Science, Data Infrastructure |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The SDR grant project (NSF Award 1738502), led by a collaboration between The Ohio State University's Departments of Sociology and Computer Science, and the Mershon Center, and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), aimed to revolutionize the way researchers access and analyze international surveys (https://wp.asc.ohio-state.edu/dataharmonization). Our primary objectives were to create data infrastructure for comparative social science research that overcomes spatial and temporal limitations of individual surveys by integrating existing data rather than collecting new ones, and develop innovative ex-post harmonization methods to ensure high-quality data integration. We crafted protocols for quality assessment and harmonization, built the SDR database and a user-friendly online portal to access and visualize it, and established educational resources for researchers in data harmonization. This multifaceted approach aimed to advance knowledge across different fields and foster broader societal impacts by enhancing the usability and reliability of cross-national survey data.
The project's main products are: (1) The SDR2 Database that offers harmonized data for studying political participation, social capital, and wellbeing across countries and time (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YOCX0M). It integrates information from 3329 national surveys of 23 international projects, featuring data from over 4.4 million respondents across 156 countries, spanning 1966-2017; (2) The "Survey Data Recycling" (SDR) approach advances harmonization methodology by addressing biases in source surveys and enabling more flexible, transparent use of harmonized data in secondary research; (3) The online SDR Portal, developed in collaboration with IFiS PAN and OSU Computer Science experts, is an intuitive tool for navigating and analyzing the complex SDR2 database, enhancing research capabilities in multi-dimensional data analysis (http://cse-dnc215869s.cse.ohio-state.edu/).
There are several other important products. The SDR2 COTTON FILE, an Excel-based data dictionary, catalogs 88,118 variables from original surveys. The project's Harmonization Workflow, which includes General Variable Reports, Detailed Variable Reports, and Cross-Walk Tables, provides operational definitions and harmonization controls in accessible formats, and outlines decision-making processes to support effective data use.
The SDR project significantly expanded its impact in the larger user community by sharing its products publicly and through various collaborative and dissemination efforts. It contributed its expertise in ex-post survey data harmonization to several international projects, including the EU-funded ActEU project and the CNB-Young project on youth employment precarity, funded by Poland’s National Science Centre. It also contributed to the harmonization and analysis of cross-national survey indicators on political efficacy, funded by the Israel Science Foundation. The SDR project fostered global research ties, particularly with South Africa's Gauteng City-Region Observatory, and spread its data harmonization methodologies through workshops, collaborations, and extensive academic publications.
The SDR project has a broad impact on science and society. It significantly influenced survey methodology, bridging social sciences with computer science. Computer scientists' involvement led to the development of the SDR Portal, focusing on database efficiency and user-friendly data visualization, spurring new ideas and system designs in computer science. The project's framework for ex-post harmonization of social science data impacted disciplines like sociology, political science, psychology, and computer science, influencing census, time use, and survey data processing. It fostered interdisciplinary collaboration and advanced visualization methods for analyzing social trends. The project’s efforts fostered a knowledge-sharing community among survey harmonization researchers, with recognition from the scientific community, evident through citations and awards, underscoring the project's influence.
The project significantly enhanced human resource development in sociology and computer science. It supported dissertation work for PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career faculty members to establish an independent research program. The project profoundly impacted education, by training PhD students in complex data analysis, and organizing international workshops on survey data recycling, ex-post harmonization and advanced statistical training. It fostered expertise in multi-level data structures and enhanced the educational experiences of young researchers and graduate students across several institutions and countries.
The SDR project significantly impacted institutional infrastructure by developing tools and methods for reprocessing and archiving social science survey data, applicable beyond sociology. It enhanced comparative research infrastructure by creating an accessible dataset with support documentation and the SDR Portal for online analysis and data customization. The project helped to define new rules for international survey research and contributed to the measurement of "total survey error" in international surveys and improving data quality and documentation standards.
In sum, the NSF-funded SDR project substantially transformed access to and analysis of international survey data, created significant impacts across scientific disciplines, enhanced global research collaborations, and advanced the frontiers of survey methodology and data harmonization.
Last Modified: 12/28/2023
Modified by: Irina Dubrow
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