Micro-Computer Based Package for Scrutiny and Tabulation of Survey Data.

Date of Submission

December 1988

Date of Award

Winter 12-12-1989

Institute Name (Publisher)

Indian Statistical Institute

Document Type

Master's Dissertation

Degree Name

Master of Technology

Subject Name

Computer Science

Department

Cryptology and Security Research Unit (CSRU-Kolkata)

Supervisor

Adhikari, Ajoy Kumar (ASU-Kolkata; ISI)

Abstract (Summary of the Work)

Analysis of survey data has, now a days, become a very important management function since many surveys are new being conduc ted by var ious organisations. These days, surveys are conducted regular ly by many organisations to ac quire up-to- date knowledge in different fields. Normally, the volume of data collected through the surveys is stupen- dous and consequently one has to make extensive use of com- puters to process the data collected.The job of computatèrised survey data processing involves two basic steps. The first step ensures that the data entered, are valid. This data validation invo lves loca- ting both data entry errors and errors due to mistakes on the part of the investigator.The second step is that of summarising information from the raw data through construction of various tables. These two basic phases of survey data processing are called scrutiny and tabulation respectively.Traditionally, the job of survey data processing trsing to comprise of writing tailor-made programs for both scrutiny and tabulation. However, this was a time consu- ming affair since this approach called for writing similar programs several times. This time could be drastically é down if a very high level language, specially suited for scrutiny and tabulation, iş designed. The objective of this dissertation was to design one such language and to imple- ment it ona micro computer.As already mentioned, the subject of analysis of survey data is assuming mo re imporaance day by day. Conse- quently, efforts were made to develope tailor made packages for scrutiny and tabulation of survey data. One very impor- tant package for cross-tabulations, developed by the Inter- national Statistical Program Center (ISPC) of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, is CENTS. This paçkage was the result of a substantia1 amount of research. ISPC developed, another package called COCENTS, also used for tabulation systems.Later, these packages were unified and a new, more flexible and more portable package called CENTS-4 was developed. All the afor ementioned packages, however, were implemented on main frames possibly because they were deve- loped before the PC boom.Thus, though packages, were evpiteble for ecrubiny and tabulation of survey data, no well- known micro computer based packages were available for these jobs.This report contains a description of the language developed and its implementation details. The report cont tains a total of four chapters. The contents of these chapters are as follows -(1) The first chapter contains general description of the problem, the way the input da ta are described, definitions of variables, expressions and constants and also contains a short description of the parser generator used to generate parsing-tables.(11) The second chapter contains a broad description of the scrutiny language. In this chapter the major constructs of the scrutiny language has been des- cribed. A1so, the different sementic checks imple- men ted has been discussed.(iii) The third chapter contains a broad description of the tabulation language. Her e also the structure of the language has been discussed at length. Some implementation details also has been provided in this chapter. This was not given in the scrunity section since the st eps of imp lementation are esson- tially the same.

Comments

ProQuest Collection ID: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:28842798

Control Number

ISI-DISS-1988-

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

http://dspace.isical.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/10263/2185

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