Epidata Manager / Calculate
Hello, I have two questions and I want to understand the design "EpiData Manager".
- I have three variables: "Date of birth mother" (date) "Date of delivery" (date) "Age (the mother in childbirth)" (numeric). In the "Edit/Calculate" of "Age" variable, I do not find the variable "Age". But I find the calculation of "Age" in the "Edit/Calculate" of "Date of birth mother" and "Date of delivery". It is anti-educational and very intriguing for me.
- In the "Edit/Calculate", I cannot find time difference, but fractions of a day. Is this expected ? Otherwise why not put a program each variable like in "Check" in the old "Epidata Entry"?
In the current state, for during my very frequent EpiData lessons, I do not recommend new programs and I keep the old EpiData Entry.... Sorry Best regards.
Bernard BRANGER, Nantes, France
Hello Bernard
I am sure we will get the new software to work appropriately and your comment and observation is very welcomed.
Obviously we need to be open to criticism, but also to take appropriate decisions during the development. And until now there has been so many other aspects to take care of that the implementation of a chk command language has not been possible.
The specific question you have in relation to age at birth can be solved like this:
a. add the variables/fields (dates) to be included in the calculation e.g. : two date fields: dbirth "date of birth mother", dchild "Date of giving birth to the child" one integer: age b. now move the cursor to the field where you would like to have the calculation done. Here: dchild (this would be the same as where you in the old software would put the "AFTER ENTRY ....END" block
d You then specify the calculation under properties for that field. d1 Specify result as "age" field and base the calculation on: dchild - dbirth d2 Specify "return value" as "years"
Since we are not using time fields for age here, just omit specification of these.
If you can give more examples of your reasons for "not suggesting to use the new versions" please let us know.
regards
Jens Lauritsen
On 01/26/2013 03:35 PM, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:
Hello, I have two questions and I want to understand the design "EpiData Manager".
- I have three variables: "Date of birth mother" (date) "Date of delivery"
(date) "Age (the mother in childbirth)" (numeric). In the "Edit/Calculate" of "Age" variable, I do not find the variable "Age". But I find the calculation of "Age" in the "Edit/Calculate" of "Date of birth mother" and "Date of delivery". It is anti-educational and very intriguing for me.
- In the "Edit/Calculate", I cannot find time difference, but fractions of a
day. Is this expected ? Otherwise why not put a program each variable like in "Check" in the old "Epidata Entry"?
In the current state, for during my very frequent EpiData lessons, I do not recommend new programs and I keep the old EpiData Entry.... Sorry Best regards.
Bernard BRANGER, Nantes, France
EpiData-list mailing list EpiData-list@lists.umanitoba.ca http://lists.umanitoba.ca/mailman/listinfo/epidata-list
These are good questions from Bernard, as always. I have in the past put a lot of calculations into .chk files, especially before Analysis was released. Now I try to keep calculations (in classic Epidata) to a minimum and only program calculations that are useful to guide or immediately validate the entry of data. With full-time professional data entry personnel, normally you do not want to interrupt the flow of entry with any checks other than some skips. With researcher-entered data, checks and skips are common and often useful.
Calculation of time (in hours or minutes) would not often be of use at the time of data entry; it is very easy to do at the time of data cleaning or analysis, either with Epidata's Analysis or any other software.
Bernard's question about age calculation led me to create a small test file that compared calculated age with entered age. This is easy, but we are missing on the Extended tab a comparison that the value of the current field must be equal to another field. This would be useful and exceedingly simple to implement. I would drop the word "than:" from the properties box to make the english reading of the comparison consistent.
Classic Epidata is still a good choice for many applications - especially if one has made a relational database or when Epidata is being used as a patient tracking and management tool. It is certainly stable enough and robust enough for this. I have been an advocate of using Manager/Entry Client to manage data for small studies where the main objective is to get data into Analysis or another software program for analysis because the process is so much simpler to teach. I love .chk programming, but very few of the people I teach in public health have any patience for programming per se.
Jamie
On 2013-01-26, Bernard wrote:
- In the "Edit/Calculate", I cannot find time difference, but fractions of a day. Is this expected ?
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