UK DATA ARCHIVE DOCUMENTATION 4938 - Families and Social Mobility : A comparative study, 1985 - 1988 Data Archive processing standards --------------------------------- The data was processed to the UK Data Archive's 'A*' standard. This is the Archive's highest standard, and means that an extremely rigorous and comprehensive series of checks was carried out to ensure the quality of the data and documentation. Briefly, the most important procedures were as follows. Checks were made that the number of cases matched the depositor's records where possible with reference to the documentation. Transcripts were fully proof-read and formatted in accordance with the in line with the Qualidata Transcription Editing Style Sheet: Generic document to correct any spelling mistakes and standardise punctuation. Any data or documentation that breached confidentiality rules was altered or suppressed to preserve anonymity. All notable and/or outstanding problems discovered are detailed under the 'Data and documentation problems' heading below. Conversion of data and documentation formats -------------------------------------------- All electronic and paper documentation supplied with this study is normally incorporated into the UKDA User Guide (in PDF format). The conversion programmes used are the latest versions of Adobe PDF Writer for electronic documentation and Adobe Paper Capture (Acrobat 'plugin' version) for paper documentation. Occasionally, some or all of the electronic documentation cannot be usefully converted to PDF (e.g. MS Excel files with wide worksheets) and this is supplied in other formats. All User Guides are fully bookmarked. In 2005, original paper copies of transcripts were digitised and converted to rtfs. These files were then further enhanced; digital PDFs were manually converted to XML. Additional editing was done to ensure complete accuracy of speaker tags and turn-taking. This also required some characters (non-Unicode compliant) to be removed from the texts. In 2013-2014, as part of the Digital Futures project, these files were further enhanced for ingest into QualiBank, the online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data. Enhancements included the addition of QuDEx compliant metadata to describe the speaker attributes, as well as TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) metadata, which marked up speaker tags and paragraph structures. Minor errors in the XML files were also found and corrected. Data and documentation problems ------------------------------- int169 and int170 appear to be two pilot interview transcripts that were included in the deposited dataset, but were not part of the original study. Thirty interviews were not deposited for archiving for copyright reasons. Interviews int013 int056 int141 Were not originally featured in the data listing supplied by the depositor, but with the exception of int013, their information has been incorporated into the UKDA data listing. Note that the depositor, Professor Paul Thompson, devised a numbering system and adopted different pseudonyms to those used in the UKDA collection. This information was not deposited with the UKDA. Hence users will find a difference in names and reference numbers used in articles published by Professor Thompson using this data set. Useful Notes ------------ A fully comprehensive data listing providing information on Family, Marriage, Housing, Education, Work parents, Work, Politics, Religion, Leisure, Health, Sex/childbirth, Misc, Region and Occupation is available in rlist4938.txt, but is only supplied when the data is ordered. The reason for this is that some of the information is too sensitive to be available to browsers of the catalogue. Original hard copy transcripts are deposited at The National Social Policy and Social Change Archive, University of Essex. Hard copy transcripts and the original audio recordings are deposited at The British Library National Sound Archive. Users should note that the download zip file for this study is called 4938tab.zip This study is available via the UK Data Service QualiBank, an online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data collections held at the UK Data Service. To explore this collection in QualiBank, click 'Explore Online' on the header of the catalogue page. Notes from data delivery and post-order corrections --------------------------------------------------- rlist4938.txt is stored as a tab-delimited file. This can be opened with Excel or Access (make sure "delimited" is checked; choose the delimiter that separates your fields: "tab"; check "first row includes field names"; text qualifier: none; click "finish")