Provide, Enrich, and Make Accessible: Using Stata’s Capabilities for Disseminating NEPS Scientific Use Data

The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) is rising as one of Germany's major publisher of scientific use data for educational research. Disseminating data from six panel cohorts makes not only structured data editing but also documentation and user support a major challenge. In order to accomplish this task, the NEPS Data Center has implemented a sophisticated metadata system. It does not only allow the structured documentation of the metadata of survey instruments and data files. It also allows one to enrich the scientific use files with further information, thus significantly easing access for data analyses. As a result, NEPS provides bilingual dataset files (German and English) and allows the user to instantly see, for instance, the exact wording of the question leading to the data in a distinct variable without leaving the dataset. To achieve this, structured metadata is attached to the data using Stata's characteristics functionality. To make handling additional metadata even easier, the NEPS Data Center provides a package of user-written programs, NEPStools, to data users. The presentation will cover an introduction to the NEPS data preparation workflow, focusing on the metadata system and its role in enriching the scientific use data by using Stata's capabilities. Afterward, NEPStools will be introduced.