Social Networking Tools: Social Tagging for Research

A key theme for the UK's Survey Question Bank (SQB) (www.surveyney.ac.uk/sqb) - the successor to the former Question Bank (Qb) run from the University of Surrey - is the push to build an online community of users. The SQB is delivering a range of strategies across the 'traditional-through-innovative' spectrum to get users involved in the service. Traditional features include the 'top-down' delivery of news via mailing lists and newsfeeds. The service has also used twitter (www.twitter.com/surveynetacuk) and Methodspace (www.methodspace.com/groups/surveyresourcesnetwork) to encourage greater 'bottom-up' activity. Most innovatively, the service will soon introduce an interactive element to its forthcoming survey question database, allowing users to comment on survey questions.

Later in 2010, the SQB will be investigating how it might house a 'grey literature' repository so that users might find a home for their previously unpublished resources/tools, papers, presentations etc. This presentation will describe these strategies and review early successes and failures.

SDA has for years been a useful means of providing basic analytic results quickly and easily for datasets stored in data archives. Recent enhancements are designed to allow SDA Web archives to provide more complete analytic services, especially for groups to collaborate in analysis. The main items to be discussed are the following:

• Private workspaces for analysts to save their created variables and to protect them from deletion or modification by other users of the data archive. This feature will facilitate collaboration across sites on a project.
• Standard errors and confidence intervals for complex samples covering all analysis procedures.
• Charts for means and for regression diagnostics (in addition to charts for tables).

This presentation will illustrate how these new features can enhance the range of analysis services provided by data archives for their users and especially how archives can facilitate multi-site and cross-national research.