Colectica is a suite of programs for use in documenting
official statistics
Official statistics are statistics published by government agencies or other public bodies such as international organizations as a public good. They provide quantitative or qualitative information on all major areas of citizens' lives, such as e ...
and specifying
statistical survey
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods".
As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey da ...
s using
open standard
An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...
s that enable researchers, archivists, and programmers to perform:
*
questionnaire
A questionnaire is a research
Research is "creativity, creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, ...
design
*
automatic programming for
computer-assisted telephone interviewing
Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) is a telephone surveying technique in which the interviewer follows a script provided by a software application. It is a structured system of microdata collection by telephone that speeds up the col ...
systems
*
data entry,
retrieval, and
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activities o ...
*
statistical analysis
Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers propertie ...
*
microdata Microdata can mean:
* Microdata (statistics), a statistical term for individual response data in surveys and censuses
* Microdata (HTML), a specification for semantic markup in HTML
* Microdata Corporation
Microdata Corporation was an American ...
documentation and management
*
applications development
*
data warehousing
In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...
*
metadata standards creation such as
Data Documentation Initiative
The Data Documentation Initiative (also known as DDI) is an international standard for describing surveys, questionnaires, statistical data files, and social sciences study-level information. This information is described as metadata by the stand ...
Colectica is currently in use by a variety of university survey research groups,
longitudinal studies,
[Midlife in the United States](_blank)
/ref>[CLOSER project](_blank)
/ref>[Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (VETSA)](_blank)
/ref> National Statistics Offices,[Statistics New Zealand Colectica Portal](_blank)
/ref> data archives, and commercial survey research organizations.[Ipsos MORI - EDDI 2014 Conferenc]
Integrating Colectica and IBM SPSS Data Collection
/ref>
History
Colectica was originally funded in part by the NIH National Institute on Aging to explore automatic documentation of computer assisted surveys.[National Institutes of Health - Automated Survey Instrument Documentation, Analysis](_blank)
/ref> This grant saw the creation of metadata extraction and flowchart creation tools for CASES, Blaise, and CSPro
CSPro, short for the Census and Survey Processing System, is a public domain data processing software package developed by the U.S. Census Bureau and ICF International. Serpro S.A. was involved in past development. Funding for development comes ...
survey instrument source code. The grant also partially funded the creation of a questionnaire specification content area in the Data Documentation Initiative's DDI Lifecycle metadata standard. The functionality of these tools, originally named SurveyViz, is now bundled with the Colectica Designer and based on the DDI standard.
The NIH funds many long-running longitudinal studies that have collected vast amounts of data, which due to their design require detailed documentation and organization. In 2011, the NIH National Institute on Aging provided further funding to add longitudinal data management functionality to Colectica[National Institutes of Health - Open Standards-Based Data Extraction Web Tool for Complex Longitudinal Datasets](_blank)
/ref>[Open Standards-Based Data Extraction Web Tool for Complex Longitudinal Datasets](_blank)
/ref> to enable documenting the complex study designs.
See also
* Data Documentation Initiative
The Data Documentation Initiative (also known as DDI) is an international standard for describing surveys, questionnaires, statistical data files, and social sciences study-level information. This information is described as metadata by the stand ...
* Official statistics
Official statistics are statistics published by government agencies or other public bodies such as international organizations as a public good. They provide quantitative or qualitative information on all major areas of citizens' lives, such as e ...
* Longitudinal study
External links
Colectica
References
{{Reflist
C Sharp software
Statistical survey software
Metadata registry
ISO/IEC 11179