Luka Štrlekar (Master’s student of Applied Statistics) and Vasja Vehovar, PhD (UL FDV) developed SurveyWeightingGUI: an open-source application (programming language R) for weighting survey data.
In survey research, it is often necessary to weight the data before analysis. This reduces bias in the estimates and ensures that the socio-demographic structure is matched. While procedures for this type of weighting are already developed (e.g. in R, STATA, SPSS, etc.), they assume that the data are fully prepared beforehand.
It is the preparation of the data that is the main and most time-consuming problem in weighting. It is the naming of the control variables, the entry and archiving of the control data, the treatment of missing values, the problem of too few categories or too few units, as well as the issues of cutting and normalising the weights and analysing their effect.
The application solves these dilemmas through a user-friendly online GUI (Graphical User Interface), while also performing and evaluating the weighting itself. The user is not directly involved with the R code of the weighting (Survey, Anesrake). This makes weighting accessible to anyone without technical knowledge of R programming, and for users who do have this knowledge, the application drastically speeds up the process.
The application has proved its worth in practice and has saved a great deal of time in the survey projects of the Centre for Social Informatics, FDV (cdi.si) and the Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre (cjm.si), FDV.
The SurveyWeightingGUI application is available online, as well as locally.