Review of Web - Based Dissemination of the General Social Survey Steven

2. Berkeley Website http://sda.berkeley.edu/archive.htm This is the data archive page for the Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) software developed and maintained by the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program at the University of California, Berkeley. This is the top dissemination source recommended by the main GSS website, and it provides online tabulation and subsetting of the 1972-2004 cumulative file. The system is usable, but it has a lot of limitations. As the SDA documentation site acknowledges at the outset, “it does not provide full documentation of the dataset.” The documentation component of the website is not integrated with the analysis and extraction facility. The documentation is sparse and difficult to navigate; there is no system for variable search and retrieval, and no facility for adding variables to a basket for downloading. There is no convenient way to determine the available years for any particular question; essentially, finding variables that have a long run of responses is a matter of trial and error. Apparently, not all questions that were asked are available from the SDA website. The Stata command files provided with extracts require extensive massaging before they will run. There is no explanation why the data stop in 2004, since 2006 data should be available.