iefieldkit - First Release!

iefieldkit - New Stata package for primary data collection

The iefieldkit is a package of commands for primary data collection. This is a topic with fewer user-written commands than for example analysis, and we think the reason for that is that there are not as many expert Stata coders in the field. But since primary data collection is equally important to quantitative research as analysis, we hope that iefieldkit will cover a part of this gap.

This package currently supports three major components of that workflow: survey design; survey completion; and data cleaning and survey harmonization.

In this first version, iefieldkit performs the following three tasks:

• Before data collection , ietestform is a compliment to the ODK syntax test on SurveyCTO server as ietestform runs tests related to best practices on how to, and how not to use features in the ODK programming language to ensure data quality, especially if the data will be imported to Stata that has other restrictions than ODK syntax.
• During data collection, ieduplicates and iecompdup (both previously released as a part of the package ietoolkit but now moved to this package) provide a workflow for detecting and resolving duplicate entries in the dataset, ensuring that the final survey dataset will be a correct record of the survey sample to merge onto the master sampling database.
• After data collection, the iecodebook commands provide a workflow for rapidly cleaning, harmonizing, and documenting datasets. iecodebook uses input specified in an Excel sheet, which provides a much more well-structured and easy to follow (especially for non-technical users) overview that the same operations written directly to a dofile.