EVS2017: What has been done to achieve good data quality?
In EVS good data quality is a priority aim. In EVS 2017, four main goals are at the core of the survey project management:
- Transparency for all partners involved in the survey (EVS planning groups, countries, users) and a good documentation of all internal processes of data processing and documentation so that the same standards and recommendations apply not only to the first countries in the field but also to the last,
- Implementation of review rounds to make sure that only data and documents approved by the EVS teams and the EVS countries are published,
- Provision of a comprehensive documentation of the published data (guidelines, master/field questionnaires, method/variable/ harmonization reports, country-specific notes), which not only helps the users to explore the data but also shows how the recommendations and standards have been implemented to allow an assessment of the data quality.
- Provision of the data as soon as possible via pre-releases. Even though the goal is to provide high data quality and good documentation already for the pre-release, this allows us to incorporate the researchers as reviewers and to improve the data step by step for the full release.
Read more about how EVS pursued these goals in each phase of the life cycle of the EVS wave 2017 and access the full EVS2017 documentation.