Transparency in Statistical Information for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and All Federal Statistical Agencies (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix B: The Role of Metadata in Assessing the Transparency of Official Statistics
Appendix B: The Role of Metadata in Assessing the Transparency of Official Statistics
Pages 219-226
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From page 219... ...
As defined in dictionaries, transparency means "the condition of being transparent," and transparent means "easy to perceive or detect." So, for us, data or some other resources are transparent when it is easy to perceive or detect where they are, what they mean, and how to use them. For our purposes, reproducibility is defined as "the extent to which consistent results are obtained when an experiment is repeated." The related term, repeatability, means "the closeness of the agreement between the results of successive measurements of the same measure carried out u nder the same conditions of measurement." Both these terms have a simpler interpretation in science than in federal statistics; however, they are useful for us as well.
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From page 220... ...
Cognitive psychologists have identified at least two kinds of concepts: entity concepts and relational concepts (Gentner and Kurtz, 2005)
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We can define a tennis ball as a ball with certain specific features -- pneumatic but not inflatable, specific colors, specific smell, fuzzy outside surface, 2.67 inches in diameter plus or minus some tolerance, weight of 2.04 ounces again subject to a tolerance, etc. So, if one is presented with a ball, it is pretty easy to determine if it is a tennis ball by examining the ball's properties.1 That is, determining if a specific ball corresponds to being a tennis ball is easy.
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From page 222... ...
CONFORMANCE It is easy to think that the only consideration in determining conformance is whether the requirement provisions are fulfilled, but that would be incomplete. In the tennis ball example below, another expression to determine whether a ball is a permissible tennis ball is to make sure the height of the bounce is between 53 and 58 inches after the ball is dropped onto a concrete floor from a height of 100 inches.
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The solution is to state which optional elements are selected. TRANSPARENCY As the previous sections of this document describe, there are a series of considerations needed to ensure transparency in federal statistics.
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One could transform Table B-2 into Table B-3, with the extended element names in italics, where the last two rows are kinds of allowed TABLE B-3 Extended Elements for Describing Variables Element name Conditions Optionality Test or other criteria name text required universe text required question text required, if result of interview result of answered question derivation formula required, if calculated from formal language other variables allowed values text required one of 2 kinds |
From page 225... ...
Now, Table B-3 provides transparency, provided the only necessary but missing information was the allowed values. Assuming this, all relevant information is provided in the metadata elements in the specification.
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