Background

Due to pretest results, a questionnaire is usually revised several times during construction. For several purposes, such as data analysis and data storage, as well as further questionnaire development in future studies, it is necessary to document those revisions in detail. This extensive documentation is also indispensable for teaching in survey research.
Nonetheless, this documentation is usually done only partially or not at all, due to a lack of useful documentation tools.

Based upon the ideas of Frauke Kreuter and Rainer Schnell, the aim of this project was the development of a program system that allows permanent electronic documentation of questionnaire development and the final state of the instrument.

Present

In November 2011 it was decided to discontinue the Software development under the name of QDDS and to branch into two separate development streams.

Prof. Schnell's group  and the SOEP-Group will work on a comprehensive documentation and data management system for large scale multi-mode surveys. This Survey Documentation System (SDS) will replace the previous documentation system of the SOEP and is designed for the data management of similar studies.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Rainer Schnell
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Duisburg/Essen
Lotharstr. 65
D-47057 Duisburg
Email:


GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences will work on the implementation of a general purpose questionnaire editor and focus on DDI 3 compliance, multiple language support, panel compatibility and question retrieval.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. York Sure-Vetter
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Quadrat B2, 1
D-68159 Mannheim
Email:

Therefore the latest version of the QDDS software is released as open source under apache license 2.0:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/qdds