Snap Surveys Managing Director, Dr. Stephen Jenkins discusses Triple-S with Jeffery Henning, president of Researchscape International
Jeffery Henning, president of Researchscape International andĀ Director at Large on the Marketing Research Associationās Board of Directors,Ā recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Stephen Jenkins, Managing Director here at Snap Surveys, andĀ founding member of the Triple-S Group.
Jeffery interviewed Stephen and providedĀ a Q&A format blog post on researchaccess.com, discussing work completed by theĀ Triple-S Group.
Blog post excerpt:
Triple-S Provides a Survey Interchange Standard
by Jeffery Henning
I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Stephen Jenkins, a founding member of the Triple-S Group and, in his day job, managing director of Snap Surveys. He brought me up to date on the Triple-S Groupās work.
Q: What is the Triple-S standard?
A: The goal of the Triple-S standard is to define a means of transferring the key elements of entire surveys between different survey software packages across various hardware and software platforms.
Triple-S essentially describes the structure and format of two text files. One, the Metadata File, contains version and general information about the survey together with definitions of the survey variables. This is used to interpret the contents of the Data File.
Survey software and system authors then write functions to write and/or read files to the Triple-S specification to enable their users to transfer surveys to software from other vendors. Some, typically analysis systems, may only read Triple-S; some, typically data collection/interviewing tools may only write Triple-S; some systems may both read and write.
