全球智库信息集成服务系统

Codebooks provide critical documentation of survey data, including: variable names, code definitions, the distribution of responses, and the full question text as it was read to respondents. This paper shows how we automated codebook production using SAS macros. Our “Makedata.sas” macro compiles metadata from a formatted SAS data file; our “Codebook.sas” macro writes the metadata to an RTF or HTML codebook using the SAS ODS report writing interface. A formatted SAS data file contains most of the information needed to generate a simple codebook with our macros. We add the survey questions by compiling the full question text and corresponding SAS variable names in Excel. The system was recently used to produce codebooks for the USDA National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) which was known in the field as the National Food Study.1