A loop written during European Health Interview Survey (EHIS, wave 3) indicator accuracy assessment. The main purpose is to write an orderly table of categorical indicators breakdowns table and do accuracy assessment for each of them: calculating the percentage of valid respondents for each value of an indicator, the standard error, prevalence rate, and the additional string column that marks how accurate the reported percentages are for the population.
The job of writing an Excel table that contains ordered breakdown reports and accuracy assesment across tens- sometimes hundreds- of indicators, each filtered trough multiple breakdowns, is a task that every survey research needs to undertake. The online data portals hosted by Eurostat, World Values Survey, European Values Survey or Slovenian National Institute of Public Health, report their survey results across various breakdown variables, usually demographic variables (age groups, sex, education, labour, regions, etc). In addition to reporting breakdowns, the accuracy of each reported result for the population needs to be assessed and results that are not sufficiently accurate are usually not reported at all.
Doing this job manually (by doing each calculation in SPSS and then writing it down in an Excel table, for example) is a long and tedious process. For this reason, during my work on EHIS wave 3, I have written this loop that does most of the job automatically and writes it in a large table in a proper form.
There are certain things that the loop lacks, however, and hopefully I will perfect it in the future. First, I haven't been able to make it write down the value labels for each indicator in a column. Instead, it writes down the values as numbers used in the survey coding. So, instead of writing "very good, good, fair, bad, very bad" for a likert scale indicator, it will fill the table with "1, 2, 3, 4, 5". While this is somewhat annoying, it is not fatal as the value numbers can be changed to value labels either manually or with further additional programming. It is a tedious additional work, especially if the resulting table has 15 000 rows (as in the case of EHIS wave 3), but still less tedious than writing it all by hand.
A second unfortunate circumstance is that, if there are no cases for some indicator value (for example, there are 0 respondents for answer "very bad"), the loop will simply not write this information down in the table as an empty row, but will just not write a row at all. While this is not necessarily a problem, in the case the report requires this to be written down, the empty rows must be added manually. As in the case of the previous issue, these are small things I will be working on in the future.
If someone has an idea how to fill these gaps, feel free to suggest the solution!