Electronic Data Center : "Metro Voices, Metro Choices: Building a Greater Atlanta" Data and Documentation

"Metro Voices, Metro Choices" Data Files and Documentation

The "Metro Voices, Metro Choices" initiative is devoted to promoting greater civic engagement and community involvement in addressing "quality of life" issues and problems in the Atlanta metropolitan area - e.g. crime, housing costs, race relations, and quality of schools. The initiative included conducting a survey of residents and local figures/leaders in the Metro Atlanta area. For the survey of residents, "[a] telephone survey of 2,543 residents of the metropolitan Atlanta region, ages 18+, was conducted between March 16 and April 11, 2005 ... [and the] survey sample was based on 14 counties containing and surrounding the City of Atlanta: Butts, Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, Coweta, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, Paulding and Rockdale." For the local figures/leaders survey, "[an] online survey (via email invitation) of 400 metro Atlanta leaders was conducted from April 8-May 9, 2005 ... [Of] the 400 leaders, 84 are in government (local, county and state; elected and nonelected), 67 are in business, 55 lead religious organizations, 92 lead community service or nonprofit organizations, and 102 are in "other" fields (including K-12 schools, higher education, healthcare, the news media and consultancies)." (All quotes are taken from a research memorandum accompanying the data files.)

The microdata files and documentation for the survey are available below. The "General Public" data refer to the survey of residents, while the "Leadership" data refer to the survey of local leaders and community figures. The data are available in the following formats: (1) fixed-format ASCII files; (2) SAS transport files; (3) SPSS portable files; (4) SPSS data files; and (5) Stata files. The SAS transport files were created via SAS' XPORT engine. Users who download these data will get a zipped file containing the XPORT data file and a SAS program to "restore" the data and create a SAS catalog file to provide variable formats/value labels for the data.

For more information about the Metro Voices/Metro Choices initiative, users should visit the project's website or contact the project directly.

Data Files:

Data File Format	General Public Data	Leadership Data
ASCII (Fixed Format)	MVMC_General-Public.asc	MVMC_ Leadership.asc
SAS Transport (zipped XPORT)	MVMCGenPub-XPORT.zip	MVMCLeader-XPORT.zip
SPSS Portable (.por)	MVMC-General-Public.por	MVMC-Leadership.por
SPSS (.sav)	MVMC-General-Public.sav	MVMC-Leadership.sav
Stata (.dta)	MVMC-General-Public.dta	MVMC-Leadership.dta