Duration of course tx28203

FDZ-LIfBi NEPS
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1

Hello,

I am interested in looking at people who have taken some kind of further training course. I am using the sc6 cohort. I have the following two questions:

  1. Is there a way to check if the wording of a particular question has changed between waves? for eg in wave 10 it was asked if the participant has taken a further education course since the last interview/the last 12 months. I want to see if this question has been asked exactly also in the previous waves. Since a change in the way a question is asked can change the definition of the variable it is important to be able to check the changes made to the questionnaire over the waves. However I cannot find any documentation regarding this.
  2. how is the variable tx28203 (Length of course in total) in the Further Education dataset generated? I tried to compare it to t271001 in spVoctrain and t271043 in spFurthereducation1 but I find a lot of discrepancy in the values
2

Dear Lisha,

  1. we do not (yet) have any structured documentation on how wordings changed. Usually, if the question text differs from the text of a previous wave, we generate a variable suffixed „_v1“, which contains the item and responses of the previous wave. The variable without the suffix contains the information from the current wave. If this happens again, we go with a variable „_v2“, and so on. If something about this proceeding concerns you, the best you can do is probably compare the question texts in the corresponding instruments published on our website.

  2. the variable is computed out of t271043 (spFurtherEdu1) and a reshaped variant of all t271011_wX (spCourses). Missings are added/recoded afterwards. What exactly puzzles you? Could you provide a minimal working example targeting your issue?

Kind regards,
Tobias

3

Hello Tobias,
Thank you. Your reply solved my query. The problem was arising because I was using the variable t271001 (total duration of course) instead of t271011_wX in spCourses to calculate duration.

Another thing I noticed was that in the Further Education dataset, tx28203 is missing for rows where the course information comes from spVocTrain. Is there a way to populate these missing values

4

Dear Lisha,

glad to hear! Variable tx28203 is the length of the course in hours. This information is not surveyed in spVocTrain. You could only estimate this number of hours by multiplying the episode duration (given by ts151*) by some standard daily-hour-rate, but this seems pretty vague to me.

Kind regards,
Tobias