![]() ![]() In both cases, the manual creation of the extract and the researcher’s lack of familiarity with the contents of the data makes for a tedious process. Option 2 is to have a stand-alone computer set up in the library, where a researcher can come and generate their own extract from files stored on a secure, internal network. Option 1 is to share the codebooks (which are also copyrighted and can’t be publicly distributed) with the researcher and haggle back and forth via email to iron out the details of the request. This poses a challenge for the data librarian, who somehow has to communicate to the researcher what’s available in the files and mediate the request. Another stipulation is that the files cannot be shared in their entirety, even for members of the licensed institution researchers must request individual extracts of variables and observations to answer a specific research question. Naturally, the microdata is copyrighted and licensed for non-commercial research purposes to members of the university or institution who are covered by the license agreement, and cannot be shared outside the institution. The microdata is valuable to social science researchers who use the responses to conduct statistical analyses. These files contain the anonymized, individual responses to the surveys. ![]() As part of the package, subscribing institutions also receive microdata files for some of the surveys, in STATA and SPSS formats. Many academic libraries subscribe to an online database called Gallup Analytics, which lets users explore and download summary statistics from a number of on-going polls and surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization, such as the US Daily Tracker poll, World Poll, and SPSS polling series. Gallup Analytics microdata serves as the example. In this post I demonstrate how export a list of variables from a STATA dta file to an Excel spreadsheet, and how to create a STATA do file by using Python to read in a list of variables from a spreadsheet the do file will generate an extract of attributes and observations from a larger dta file. ![]()
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