Open Access
IDS Transposer: A Users Guide
Author(s) -
Emily Klancher Merchant,
George Alter
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
historical life course studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2352-6343
DOI - 10.51964/hlcs9339
Subject(s) - computer science
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) provides a standard format for storing and sharing individual-level longitudinal life-course data (Alter and Mandemakers 2014; Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009). Once the data are in the IDS format, a standard set of programs can be used to extract data for analysis, facilitating the analysis of data across multiple databases. Currently, life-course databases store information in a variety of formats, and the process of translating data into IDS can be long and tedious. The IDS Transposer is a software tool that automates this process for source data in any format, allowing database administrators to specify how their datasets are to be represented in IDS. This article describes how the IDS Transposer works, first by going through an example step-bystep, and then by discussing each part of the process and potential options and exceptions in detail.