MAKING IT USEABLE    Editing       Recoding

Several coding and re-coding operations were necessary to put the data in the desired form, including:

• Examining all "other, specify" responses for all items in which the interviewer had marked this option and entered text describing another response category.  In many cases, the "other, specify" responses could appropriately fit into one of the previously listed categories for the questionnaire item and these were corrected.
  
  
• In other cases, additional response categories which had not been anticipated were reported with sufficient frequency to be added to the list of response options.
  
  
• Reported vehicle make and model information was edited for reasonableness and National Accident Sampling System (NASS) make and model codes were added to the database.
  
  
• Standard codes were added to the database to replace the "don't know" and "refused" responses, and to indicate items, which were not answered due to skip patterns in the survey questionnaire.

In the travel day section, trips with the purpose of "change transportation means" were edited and combined with adjacent trips.  Interviewers had been instructed to use the "change means" trip purpose only for those cases in which respondents insisted that this was the only purpose of the trip, and they were unable to determine what the trip purpose should have been.  These trips were later combined with the trips the person took before or after the change means trip.

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