9360093 Peterson This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop software that enables a researcher to develop and document a social data set. The software will ease development by automating those tasks that can best be done by computer. It will improve instrumentation and documentation by providing a structure and format that are complete and of high quality. It will also eliminate much of the post-data-collection effort of documenting a data set for public use. The proposed software program would be a significant resource for social scientists. It would provide a tool to assist the researcher with several steps in the research process, including data set development, documentation, cleaning, and analysis file creation. Furthermore, it would integrate all these steps in one program and provide a link to the archiving task for those data sets that are to be placed in the public domain. Successful completion of this research will lay the groundwork for highly useful computer software tools of value not only to social scientists but also to market researchers, government statistical agencies, and others in applied fields that employ social data. ***
