Social Science Metadata and the Foundations of the DDI

The work and life of Sue A. Dodd had influence in its own right and her work was adapted and incorporated by others just as her work was influenced by others and part of a general evolution of social science metadata. From her focus on the catalogue description of machine-readable data that made users able to reference and identify data files as a research source, the description of social science data files gained further momentum. This paper centers on the fundamentals of social science data and their relation to metadata. There are levels of metadata in typical social science where the study, the variables of the study and the codes of the variables define a hierarchy. For each level there are many potential descriptive items that can be part of the full metadata. The work was initiated in the US but there was also work carried out in Europe through the described period, mostly centered around 1975-1995. All of this can be considered the foundation of social science data metadata description that later evolved to become the work carried out within the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI).