The primary purpose of this project is to produce a single CD-ROM containing all of the March Current Population Surveys (CPS) from 1964 to present, together with user-friendly software that will permit easy data extraction and easy access to coding, universe information, and questionnaires context of all variables. The foundations of the project are three computer utilities that have been adapted to run on 386/486/586 machines running DOS. One utility searches through a dictionary of variables to find all variable names that contain a user-supplied character string. A second utility takes a list of variable names supplied by the user and produces an ASCII file of the CPS data for the requested year, while simultaneously issuing a report containing coding and universe information for each variable. The third utility outputs a list of CPS questions that gave rise to the variables selected by the user. Phase II funding is sought to introduce additional improvement, to enhance speed of extraction, to develop an interface with Windows and a version for the SPARCstation, to begin commercialization of the product, and to develop additional CDs containing the October CPS and the ongoing rotations.
Targeted to researchers in both the academic and nonacademic communities, this project will produce all data, coding, universe information, and questionnaire context for March Current Population Surveys from 1964--1992 on a single CD that is usable in a 386/486 DOS environment.
