Policy on Codebooks for RDC Datasets

Question

I am part of a team looking at the National Survey of the Work and Health of Nurses (NSWHN) survey. At our initial meeting at the RDC in Toronto, we were told that the codebook (containing the data dictionary with frequencies for all variables) could not be made available to us outside the RDC.

My question is: why not?

Other RDC-available surveys make data dictionaries freely available on the Web. Could someone tell me why an exception is being made for this survey? Even just a record layout, without any associated frequencies, would be useful. It would make life so much simpler, especially for a research group scattered clear
across the country.

Answer

I talked to the subject matter and it's not general practice to have codebooks and data dictionaries from master files available to DLI. Only a few subject matters did and only after ensuring that there is no confidential data released. The author division had no intention of making this codebook for the Health Nurses Survey outside of the RDC. They may go back and look at the codebook to see if they can release but at the present time, they don't have any resources to do so and don't know when they would be able to do so.

For most author divisions, they only release the codebook for PUMF which ensure that no confidential data are released. What is on our Web are the PUMF codebook and only a few exceptions have masterfiles codebook.