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The three following principles were conceived purposefully to give structure and guidance as to how the first principle should be followed at all times and in all situations.

In example 1 below we can see that Does the mother care for children at home ... ? is in bold. We do not document this, however we do document that the order of the code list is Yes, No, No known.

Example 1 Questionniare Birth Survey (1970) (BCS)

2. Do not correct the questionnaire.

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There are rare situations where Principle 2 must be violated in order to follow Principle 1 and document meaningful metadata. A real-world example of this is when a code value is accidently printed with the wrong value. There is no easy way to alias code values and CLOSER's documentation would suggest that there are two distinctly different codes, while the dataset would only refer to one of the codes. In this case, documenting the mistake would mislead the user and violate Principle 1.

 

As can be seen in Figure 4 the code values change partway down the right hand column. This causes an issue while documenting as it is not possible to change a CodeAnswer part way down a QuestionGrid, therefore the question can no longer be documented as a single QuestionGrid. In addition to this, it is highly unlikely that the change of code value was intentional; so it is also highly unlikely that the dataset would reflect the mistake. In this situation it is deemed appropriate to violate the fourth principle and check if the dataset contains any values of 3, or were they all recorded as 1. If it is confirmed that the code values of 3 are a mistake then correcting the code values provides a more accurate documentation of the structure of the question and how the question is mapped to the data collected.

Example 2 Questionniare ALSPAC

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Only record what is contained within the questionnaire.

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