Meta-database Construction

The construction of a meta-database will make an important contribution to substantive research and policy in Wales by providing a foundation for helping to describe how quantitative and qualitative data can be integrated across different dimensions and analysed to determine their strengths and weaknesses.  The dimensions include the spatial units of analysis; the temporal units of analysis describing the continuity and currency of the data; the thematic units of analysis describing the substantive questions, and/or variables and content; and the categorical units of analysis describing the coding and breaks and keywords used in classifying the data.

The meta-database will be designed to allow researchers to search for (via the geo-portal) secondary data based on their own research themes (e.g. ethnicity, income, migration), spatial location and time periods and will provide a summary of the relevant variables in the different data sets, their coding/classification schemes, details of survey methods and sample sizes, and where the data is held and how it can be accessed (e.g. through the Office for National Statistics (ONS), through the UK Data Archive (UKDA), through WISERD).

In conducting this research, there exists an opportunity to develop a new meta-data standard for use in multi-disciplinary collaborative research projects based on existing robust metadata standards.  

The meta-database will provide the main framework for the collection, integration, management and dissemination of WISERD data.  It will also highlight any data deficit across the dimensions which could be used to inform any subsequent large-scale social surveys in Wales.