European Question Bank

EQB

The CESSDA Euro Question Bank (EQB) is a cross-national question bank that integrates and displays metadata from several European archives, mostly CESSDA Service Providers.

The platform allows the user to search, browse, compare, and download multilingual survey questions and study-related metadata. Users can search question texts, response alternatives and keywords. Questions can be filtered by data collection dates or countries, question languages, and by the methodology used for data collection.

EQB end users are researchers, questionnaire designers, and survey methodologists.

Researchers can find relevant questions for their research topics in one place. They can compare different versions and different translations of questions. They can find out about question use and get direct links to the data collected using these questions.

The EQB can also help questionnaire designers and translators interested in high-quality, tested questions or translations of questions. They can get a sense of how translators handled translation issues for particular questions by comparing questions side-by-side.

The EQB is also useful for survey methodologists. They can see how questions on a particular topic have changed over time. Not only can they access and export survey questions, they can also find study-related information and documentation.

The Euro Question Bank is based on the DDI-Lifecycle metadata standard. CESSDA Service Providers contribute documentation from their holdings to the EQB using DDI standardised metadata, preferably in DDI Lifecycle version 3.2 or DDI Codebook. The DDI based documentation is provided by OAI-PMH or file-based access. 

The CESSDA Metadata Validator (CMV) and the EQB DDI profile are used to validate the DDI metadata. The EQB metadata schema is compliant with the CESSDA Metadata Model (CMM).