GEEDE: Grid Enabled Educational Data Environment
The 'GEEDE' service (Grid Enabled Educational Data Environment) is one of three related provisions developed in the DAMES Node under the umbrella term 'GESDE' (Grid Enabled Specialist Data Environments; introduction to GESDE).
GEEDE is concerned with buidling up a library of data resources linked to measures of educational qualifications in social survey research. Typical resources available from GEEDE are coding frames for categories of relative educational attainment, and summary statistics covering data such as on the changing prevalence of different educational qualifications across birth cohorts
The GEEDE 'portal' has been available to registered users and guests since August 2010. To go direct to the portal follow this link. The rest of this page is used to describe the GEEDE project and the portal's contribution, and give help and instructions on using the portal itself.
Portal's down? If you tried to access the GEEDE portal but there was an error, you can also pick up many of the same resources from our back-up service 'GESDE-lite'.
BACKGROUND
Like its sister services GEODE and GEMDE (see a full description in the NTTS conference paper by Lambert et al. 2011), the Grid Enabled Educational Data Environment seeks to provide a service that social scientists can use to access specialist data about educational qualifications, as well as to disseminate their own data resources alongside adequate metadata to describe them.
Data on educational qualifications can be particularly difficult to deal with in survey research because taxonomies of educational qualifications ('educational unit groups') tend to be complex and to change rapidly over time or between societies. For instance, the figure above illustrates the difficulty of using measures of education for longitudinal comparisons in the UK, since the numbers in different qualification categories change substantially over time due to institutional transformations. Accordingly, measures of educational qualifications are frequently correlated with the age (i.e. school leaving cohort) of respondent, as well as with other socio-demographic factors such as gender and region. Such correlations mean that there is considerable pay-off to thinking hard about the way in which measures of educational qualifications are operationalised in statistical analysis.
Two useful recent overviews of educational measures with a UK focus can be found in Jenkins and Sabates (2007) and Schneider (2011). There are also many good solutions to problems of measuring education, including scaling educational categories by suitable metrics (e.g. Buis 2010) or allocating categories to a well-documented standard (e.g. Schnieder 2010). At the GEEDE service we try to facilitate good practice in working with educational qualifications such as by:
- Documenting different taxonomies of educational qualifications (what we call 'Educational Unit Groups')
- Facilitating access to statistical data about classifications (what we call 'Educational Information Resouces')
- Facilitating preparation and analysis of data on educational qualifications (by drawing upon data on EUGs and EIRs as is available for download from the GEEDE portal).
HOW TO USE GEEDE
- Talk: Introduction to GEEDE (pdf), by Paul Lambert
- Talk: Dealing with data on educational qualifications: Principles and practice (pdf), by Vernon Gayle
- Talk: Some old and new measures using educational qualifications (pdf), by Paul Lambert
- Handout: An example illustrating curating data with the GEEDE system (doc), by Paul Lambert
- Background file: A small data file used as pat of the illustrative example, featuring educational codes (xls), by Ken Prandy, Marge Unt and Paul Lambert
- Background file: A research paper used as part of the illustrative example (pdf), by Ken Prandy, Marge Unt and Paul Lambert
CONTACT
We're still developing GEEDE. Please contact us with feedback/comments on the service and its usability. Feel free to tell us...
- Did you understand what we're trying to do here..?
- What needs to be clearer?
- Did the portal work when you used it?
- What problems did you find? How could we fix them?
- Have we forgotten something?
GEEDE is work undertaken by the Data Management through e-Social Science Node, supported by the ESRC. The main work in developing the GEEDE service has been undertaken by Guy Warner and Paul Lambert (see DAMES Node personnel). Many others from the Node have also contributed to the resource, especially Larry Tan, Jesse Blum, and Vernon Gayle.
- To send us feedback on GEEDE, we suggest emailing or contacting Paul Lambert in the first instance:
Workshops/Outreach events/Publications
We have presented materails from GEEDE in several workshops and presentations, whilst the service is also desribed in some of our papers from the DAMES Node. For latest outputs see:
Known bugs
Regrettably we have experienced a few different bugs with the GEEDE portal in the time that we have been running it. Below we list any notes of bugs that are relevant at the time of writing (we are still working on the services and will be trying to address known bugs as rapidly as possible). If you are depositing a data resource at GEEDE through the 'curation tool', please can we urge you to keep a 'curation log' document where you paste a copy of text that you enter (e.g. title, abstract, etc). This ought to mean that, at a minimum, any new information you prepare is stored safely if anything goes wrong with the subsequent process (e.g. you get a warning message such as 'unable to curate')
- Curation tool is unable to curate
- Since May 2012 we have been aware of a bug preventing submitted materials via the curation tool (i.e. new information resources being prepared for dissemination to others) from being saved successfully. We are working on finding a solution at time of writing.
- Date: Since May 2012. Seriousness: High - impedes functionality. Scope: Effects both GEODE and GEEDE.
- Resources uploaded are not available to search engine
- Since January 2012, we are aware of a database problem which means that new resources submitted to GEODE/GEEDE since then are not visible to the basic search engine by other users (they are however stored in the system, and visible through other means such as the 'ratings' page).
- Date: Since Jan 2012. Seriousness: Medium - impedes functionality. Scope: Effects both GEODE and GEEDE.
- File manager display borders sub-optimal
- If using the service as a 'registered user' and accessing your filestore area, there is a bug with the windowing of the file manager tool which makes it very difficult to see the full range of files (the window borders obscure the natigation scrollbars). The service is still usable but it needs care to be taken to look fully at the left and lower scrollbars
- Date: Since May 2011. Seriousness: Low. Scope: Effects both GEODE and GEEDE.
- Time out warnings
- Not necessarily a bug but a common source of user problems. The GEEDE and GEODE portals have an automatic time-out due to inactivity. Pop-up warnings will be sent to the top of your browser session if you are nearing your limit, and you may need to click 'extend' at this warning to extent your time allowance. Depending on your browser, moving between functions within GEODE may or may not be counted as session activity - so sometimes the server records you as 'inactive' even though you are moving around or adding some bits of data.
- Date: Since December 2011. Seriousness: Low. Scope: Effects both GEODE and GEEDE.
References
Buis, M. L. (2010). Inequality of Educational Outcome and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in the Netherlands during the 20th Century. Amsterdam: VU University Amsterdam.
Jenkins, A., & Sabates, R. (2007). The Classification of Qualifications in Social Surveys. London: Technical Report 2007/2, Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London (full text pdf).
Lambert, P.S., Gayle, V., Tan, K.L.L., Blum, J.M., Bowes, A., Jones, S., Turner, K.J., Warner, G., Sinnott, R.O. and Bihagen, E. (2008). Grid Enabled Specialist Data Environments: Forward Planning for the GE*DE Services for Specialist Data on Occupations, Educational Qualifications, and Ethnicity, University of Stirling: Technical Paper 2008-1 of the Data Management through e-Social Science Research Node (www.dames.org.uk).
Lambert, P.S., Warner, G., Doherty, T., McCafferty, S., Watt, J., Comerford, M., Gayle, V., Tan, K.L.L., Blum, J., Bowes, A.B. Collaborative systems for enhancing the analysis of social surveys: the Grid Enabled Specialist Data Environments, European Statistics - New Technologies and Techniques in Statistics Biennial conference, Brussels, 22-24 February 2011 (conference; full text pdf)
Schneider, S. L. (2010). Nominal comparability is not enough: (In-)Equivalence of construct validity of cross-national measures of educational attainment in the European Social Survey. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28(3), 343-357.
Schneider, S. L. (2011). Survey Question Bank: Topic Overview 6: Measuring Educational Attainment. Colchester: University of Essex, Survey Resources Network, Survey Question Bank (http://www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/topics/commentaries.asp).
Last updated 17/MAY/2012, by Paul Lambert