Looking for data (online survey)

The transcripts of the expert interviews are also available through this data archive upon request. The core result of this study is that community involvement plays a pivotal role in survey data seeking. The analyses show that survey data communities are an important determinant in survey data users' information seeking behaviour and that community involvement facilitates data seeking and has the capacity of reducing problems or barriers.

In the quantitative part of the study, the following hypotheses were tested: (1) The data seeking hypotheses: (1a) When looking for data, information seeking through personal contact is used more often than impersonal ways of information seeking. (1b) Ways of information seeking (personal or impersonal) differ with experience. (2) The experience hypotheses: (2a) Experience is positively correlated with having ambitious goals.

(2b) Experience is positively correlated with having more advanced requirements for data. (2c) Experience is positively correlated with having more specific problems with data. (3) The community involvement hypothesis: Experience is positively correlated with community involvement.

(4) The problem solving hypothesis: Community involvement is positively correlated with problem solving strategies that require personal interactions. The calculations made to test these hypotheses can be reproduced with the syntax file LfdAnalysis.do that is provided together with the survey dataset.