University of Waterloo
             Electronic Data Service Task Group
               Minutes of Meeting Mar 29, 1995


Present:  Doug Morton (Chair)
                Albert Kemp
                Bill Oldfield (Secretary)
                Richard Pinnell
                Carol Vogt
                Sue Moskal

Absent:   Debbie Tytko
               Shabiran Rahman


1.   Minutes of the meeting of March 22th.

     Accepted without change.

2.   Demo of SPSS by Carol Vogt

      Carol Vogt provided a general overview training session
       of SPSS for the members of UW-EDS using the VAW
       (Violence Against Women dataset). Carol noted that five
       pieces of information are required for a scholar or student
       to effectively use a particular dataset.

       1.    Information about the survey method

       This information is necessary for the client to understand
       the source of the data, how it was collected and the objectives
        of the survey.  This information should be present in an
        "About" file in the UW-EDS  Web space.

       2.    The questionnaire

       The actual questionnaire must be made available to the client
       so that the type and method of the questions can be examined.
       This should be a separate file accessible to clients through the
       UW-EDS Web space.

      3.    The codebook

       The codebook must be available since it contains information
       about the variable names, the codes used to record the answers,
       and the record layout.

     4.    Stub file or file access information

      Using a SPSS stub file or access information indicating the NFS
      (Network File System) location of the data the client builds an
      extract program to run against the dataset to extract the required
       information.

     5. An NFS mounted dataset

     This is the full dataset which provide the starting point for a client's
      statistical analysis.


      Using these sources of information the client run an SPSS
      program to extract the required information from the dataset
      to create an SPSS program file.  The program file contains the
      variables, variable names and coded value information.  Subsequent
      SPSS statistical programs are then run against this file.

      The session was extremely instructive and an additional session
      on SAS is planned.

3.   New Secretary

      Albert Kemp volunteered to take on the secretary duties for the
      month of April.