This survey dataset is part of the project "Looking for data: information seeking behaviour of survey data users", a study of secondary data users’ information-seeking behaviour. The overall goal of this study was to create evidence of actual information practices of users of one particular retrieval system for social science data in order to inform the development of research data infrastructures that facilitate data sharing. In the project, data were collected based on a mixed methods design. The research design included a qualitative study in the form of expert interviews and – building on the results found therein – a quantitative web survey of secondary survey data users. The survey dataset comprises 1,458 valid cases (1,727 cases including incomplete contributions). The transcripts of the expert interviews are also available through this data archive upon request. The core result of this study is that community involvement plays a pivotal role in survey data seeking. The analyses show that survey data communities are an important determinant in survey data users' information seeking behaviour and that community involvement facilitates data seeking and has the capacity of reducing problems or barriers. In the quantitative part of the study, the following hypotheses were tested: (1) The data seeking hypotheses: (1a) When looking for data, information seeking through personal contact is used more often than impersonal ways of information seeking. (1b) Ways of information seeking (personal or impersonal) differ with experience. (2) The experience hypotheses: (2a) Experience is positively correlated with having ambitious goals. (2b) Experience is positively correlated with having more advanced requirements for data. (2c) Experience is positively correlated with having more specific problems with data. (3) The community involvement hypothesis: Experience is positively correlated with community involvement. (4) The problem solving hypothesis: Community involvement is positively correlated with problem solving strategies that require personal interactions. The calculations made to test these hypotheses can be reproduced with the syntax file LfdAnalysis.do that is provided together with the survey dataset.

All registered users of the data catalogue, who have agreed to receive e-mail, were invited by e-mail to take part in the survey. These were a total of 16,727 eligible e-mail-addresses, excluding bounces and re-directs. In total, 1,388 interviews were completed. The sample was supplemented by an intercept sampling performed on the webpage of the data catalogue, where respondents were recruited by pop-up message. The complementary sample produced 70 completed interviews, adding up to a total of 1,458 interviews.

Web-basiertes Interview