Data Quality

By Martin Spratt. ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, 2008

341 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the years an increasing number of countries have joined the project and in the last survey 35 European countries collaborated on data collections on nationally representative samples. In some countries these surveys have covered also other age groups, since this have been of important national interest. In 2003 eight ESPAD countries collected data also among students aged 17–18, i.e. students born in 1985. These countries are: France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Po-land, Portugal, the Slovak Republic and Sweden. Due to organisational change and limited resources the Portuguese data are not included in this report. Methodology The ESPAD surveys are conducted with a standardised methodology including an identical questionnaire to provide as comparable data as possible. Data reported here were mainly collected during Spring 2003 and the students included in this report are all born in 1985. This means that they turned 18 during the year of data collection. At the time of data collection the mean age of this group was 17.8 years. Data were collected by group-administered questionnaires in schools on nationally representative samples of classes. The questionnaires used were the same as in the regular ESPAD surveys. Teachers or research assistants collected the data. The students answered the questionnaires anonymously in the classroom under conditions similar to a written test. The sample sizes varied from 1640 in Latvia to 5130 in Italy. The results of the surveys were reported in a standardised format. These country reports constitute the basis of the content of this report. Every effort was made to standardise the methodology of the ESPAD project across countries. Nevertheless, some methodological issues inevitably arise in this kind of surveys. The representativeness of the samples vary between countries, since school is no longer compulsory at this level, which means that some individuals earlier enrolled in compulsory school have now left school. However, the absolute majority of the age cohort is still enrolled in some kind of schooling. Thus, the results presented in this report are representative for students born in 1985. The validity is deemed to be high in most of the countries. The cultural context in which the students have answered the questions has most probably differed between countries. However, this does not necessarily indicate large differences in the willingness to give honest answers. For various reasons it was not possible to give precise levels of statistical significance in this report. Small differences in point estimates between …

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bf7ea30d51991d0dde7abf1dd7d3f153f5580a7

Citations in the corpus