The School Leavers' Study Data Verification: A Cross Check For Typographical Errors, Omissions, And Dubious Word Interpretations

This data set reflects a verification procedure to check for typographical errors, data omissions, and dubious word interpretations made by UK data curators. During the course of verification, the XML files contained in the UK Data Service repository were cross checked against the RTF files. In the course of verifying the documents, some changes were adopted to wording, as with essay 110, where the word "regretted" makes sense in the sentence as opposed to the suggested term "{regarted?}" noted in the XML file. Any changes during verification were performed by the close reading method, whereby contextual clues in the sentence guided the investigator to make a guess on the term intended by the original essay writer. When contexts were not sufficient to resolve meanings and spellings, original words and spellings were kept. Examples of former omissions within documents include essay number 148. The following statement was omitted from the XML file: "I retired not long ago after forty years with the same company. Life is very tedious now and I spend most of my time just sitting around thinking of the past." Essay 150 suffered the same problem: "life my first interview was nerve wracking.", exists in the RTF file, but was missing from the XML file. In cases where the RTF and XML files are in dispute over omissions, I have included the missing information from the RTF file into the data set. Place names have been edited so they read with standard British spellings. The data have been cleaned and standardized to American spellings, and this reflects the investigator's framework over the data. English turns of phrases were retained as much as possible. The investigator is aware that any transcription of historical data (e.g. be it from the curators' translations of writings on original printed pages to digital objects) includes adding personal perspective into the documents themselves. This is a limitation to the data cleaning process, and is here noted. Readers are invited to compare and contrast this verified data set with the original XML and RTF files.The second edition of the data deposited in the UK repository is cited as: Pahl, R.E. (2012). <em>School Leavers Study, 1978</em>. [data collection]. <em>2nd Edition. </em>UK Data Service. SN: 4867, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4867-1 The original data are available under a Creative Commons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The data may be accessed through the UK Data Service Qualibank.