SDA is a set of programs for the documentation and Web-based
analysis of survey data. SDA is developed and maintained by the
Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program (CSM) at Berkeley. SDA is widely
used by data producers and distributors -- including the University of
Minnesota (IPUMS), the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social
Research (ICPSR), UC Los Angeles, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, CPANDA, PPIC, and
many others - and provides fast and powerful online analytic access to a
broad variety of research data.
Peaker: J. Merrill Shanks
Merrill Shanks is Professor of Political Science at University of
California, Berkeley. He joined the staff of ICP(S)R at the University of
Michigan in 1963 as its fifth employee, and worked as a lecturer in the
Summer Program. To expedite these tasks of data cleaning for the National
Election Surveys , he developed initial software for cleaning data and
creating "machine-readable" codebooks. With Lutz Erbring, he initiated plans
for an "interactive" transposed-file statistical system, which would later
become the Survey Documentation and Analysis online analysis software, or
SDA. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and became
Assistant Professor and Director of the Berkeley Survey Research Center.
During this time Merrill was a principal advocate and committee member for
the creation of a central IT organization at Berkeley, and he initiated
demonstration software for Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI).
In 1996, Merrill completed The New American Voter with Warren Miller,
featuring the 1992 election. Merrill served as the founding Chair of the
Governing Committee for the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) beginning in
1995.
More recently, Merrill has served as Principal Investigator for the Public
Agendas and Citizen Engagement Survey (PACES) and has completed several
PACES-based conference papers and NES-based extensions of The New American
Voter.
