Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Survey Documentation and Analysis with South Caucasus data

Earlier this month, CRRC launched Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA), a web-based interface for statistical analysis. SDA was designed by the Association for Computer Assisted Survey at the University of California, Berkeley. Through SDA you can for example calculate frequencies, make cross tabulations, comparison of means and comparison of correlations. CRRC has now loaded its data, based on interviews carried out with more than 6 000 respondents in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, into the SDA platform. As a result, it is now possible for anyone to find out information on everything from language knowledge to perceptions of the Russian-Georgian war.

In comparison to several other statistical software programs, SDA does not require any prior knowledge of statistics. Extracting data is an easy and fast process, as the program provides the user with explanations for the different functions. In addition, there is no need to download any software. You simply visit http://www.crrccenters.org/sda/ and start exploring CRRC’s data. Having reliable, up-to-date and easily accessible data on an extensive number of topics is now also possible for those of us that have earlier refrained from using statistical data due to its sometimes rather complex nature.

1 comment:

atlas245 said...

Interesting points on extracting data, For simple stuff i use python to get or simplify data,data extraction can be a time consuming process but for larger projects like files, the web, or documents i tried "extracting data from the web" which worked great, they build quick custom screen scrapers, extracting data, and data parsing programs