:''This article refers to data surrounding the administration of surveys. For information about contextualized usage data for digital learning resources see
Paradata (Learning Resource Analytics)
As a general definition, paradata are usage data about learning resources that include not just quantitative metrics (e.g., how many times a piece of content was accessed), but also pedagogic context, as inferred through the actions of educators a ...
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The paradata of a data set or survey are data about the process by which the data were collected. Paradata of a survey are usually "administrative data about the survey."
Example paradata topics about a survey include the times of day interviews were conducted, how long the interviews took, how many times there were contacts with each interviewee or attempts to contact the interviewee, the reluctance of the interviewee, and the mode of communication (such as phone, Web, email, or in person). Thus there are paradata about each ''observation'' in the survey. These attributes affect the costs and management of a survey, the findings of a survey, evaluations of interviewers, and inferences one might make about non-respondents.
Paradata information can be used to help achieve the goals of a survey. For example, early responses may be mainly from one type of respondent, and the collectors knowing this can focus on reaching the other types so the survey has good coverage of the intended population. Thus survey efforts can be dynamically responsive to the paradata.
In principle a survey's
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
includes its paradata.
The term is attributed to Couper (1998).
[Mick P. Couper. 1998. Measuring survey quality in a CASIC environment. In ''Proceedings of the Section on Survey Research Methods of the American Statistical Association''. http://www.asasrms.org/Proceedings/papers/1998_006.pdf]
References
Survey methodology