Metadata Schema of the CESSDA EuroQuestionBank: Documentation and Publication of Survey Questions in a European Question Bank; Version 1.0

Abstract

Existing question data banks for social science survey research mainly operate at the national level. National question data banks serve their constituent research communities and only include questions from surveys that have been conducted within their own countries. This limits the pool of available questions to draw from, as well as possibilities for cross-national comparative research, an increasingly important aim of social science investigation. The CESSDA EuroQuestion-Bank (EQB) project implements a cross-national question bank with a central search facility across all CESSDA's survey holdings to display survey questions in different languages in a user-friendly application. A wide variety of surveys, survey questions, and question-related information are provided by CESSDA Service Providers (SPs), who contribute their documentation by using DDI standardized metadata. This paper outlines functionalities of the EQB application, technical aspects of the EQB architecture and introduces the EQB metadata schema.