iefieldkit - Stata Commands for Primary Data Collection

Pre-print of Stata Journal article

Installation

ssc install iefieldkit

To install iefieldkit, type ssc install iefieldkit in Stata. This will install the most recent published version of iefieldkit. The main version of the code in the repo (the main branch) is what is published on SSC as well.

To make sure that you have the most recent published version of iefieldkit installed type adoupdate iefieldkit, update in Stata, or type adoupdate and follow the instructions to update all your user-written Stata commands (including iefieldkit) on your computer.

See below for more ways to installing the package and how to install unpublished versions of the package for development purposes.

Introduction

The iefieldkit is a package of commands for primary data collection. This is a topic with fewer user-written commands than for example analysis, and we think the reason for that is that there are not as many expert Stata coders in the field. But since primary data collection is equally important to quantitative research as analysis, we hope that iefieldkit will cover a part of this gap.

This package currently supports three major components of that workflow: survey design; survey completion; and data cleaning and survey harmonization.

Read the wiki articles for these command for a thorough description on the use cases and work flows that these commands are intended for. See the helpfiles by typing help followed by the command name for instructions on how to run these commands in Stata.

Some features of the command might require meta data specific to SurveyCTO, but you are of course free to try these commands on any use case. iefieldkit is similar to the package ietoolkit but the commands in iefieldkit relates only to primary data collection using SurveyCTO.

In this first version, iefieldkit performs the following three tasks:

• Before data collection , ietestform is a compliment to the ODK syntax test on SurveyCTO server as ietestform runs tests related to best practices on how to, and how not to use features in the ODK programming language to ensure data quality, especially if the data will be imported to Stata that has other restrictions than ODK syntax.
• During data collection, ieduplicates and iecompdup (both previously released as a part of the package ietoolkit but now moved to this package) provide a workflow for detecting and resolving duplicate entries in the dataset, ensuring that the final survey dataset will be a correct record of the survey sample to merge onto the sampling database.
• After data collection, the iecodebook commands provide a workflow for rapidly cleaning, harmonizing, and documenting datasets. iecodebook uses input specified in an Excel sheet, which provides a much more well-structured and easy to follow (especially for non-technical users) overview that the same operations written directly to a dofile.

More on installation

The vast majority of users should install the command by typing ssc install iefieldkit in Stata. The only reason for not installing the package like that is if your are contributing to the development or testing not yet developed features and want to install unpublished versions of this package.

Installing unpublished version of this package

If you want a yet to be published version of iefieldkit then you can use the code below. The code below installs the version currently in the main branch, but replace main in the URL below with the name of the branch you want to install from. You can also install older version of iefieldkit like this but it will only go back to January 2019 when we set up this method of installing the package.

    **When working with multiple version from different sources, 
    * then you should always start by making sure any previously 
    * installed version of iefieldkit is removed
    cap ado uninstall iefieldkit

    *Install iefieldkit directly from the repository
    net install iefieldkit , from("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/worldbank/iefieldkit/main/src") replace

If you are using a work computer where you are not permitted to make a net call to the internet from Stata, then you can do the following. Download the files from this repository by clicking the green Clone or download button. Click the <> code tab if you do not see that button. Unzip the folders on your computer and change the URL in from() in the code above to the location of the src folder where you unzipped the files on your computer.

Installing the published version again.

After you have done the contributions or testing that you intended to do, you have to manually make sure that you re-install the published and tested version of iefieldkit. Follow the code below to do so.

    *Remove the installed version of iefieldkit
    cap ado uninstall iefieldkit

    *Install the most recent published version of iefieldkit
    ssc install iefieldkit

Errors after installing from multiple sources

If you have installed a package from multiple sources, then you might get the error below. If you get that error, follow the instructions here.