Data Comparison

Which Variables Should We Use?

Social scientists concern about the variables they will use for their research. Let's say GDP. Are you going to use nominal GDP or real GDP or GDP with PPP? How about GDP per capita? What does it mean by constant dollar and international dollar? There are a lot of things that the codebook does not explain. Even more, there are so many similar indexes among socio-economic indexes. For example, there are corruption indexes from CPI, ICRG, V-Dem, WGI, and WJP. Which index should we choose? What are their pros and cons? Within a short time of research, social scientists barely have time to compare all.

ARIC seeks to produce usable knowledge for people. As part of this theme, we made a 'Data Comparison' section to provide information of similar data, so that academic research can produce more usable knowledge for people.