We hired a select group of undergraduate, graduate, and law students to code the constitutional events. In order to minimize errors in the final dataset, each constitutional event will be surveyed twice by different coders working independently. After this double-coding, each constitution will be reviewed by one of the PIs to check for errors and to resolve discrepancies among multiple coders. The final dataset will include those responses for which the two coders agree and a “reconciled” answer for questions in which they disagree. Some of this important work may be undertaken by a small number of carefully selected graduate students, once their skills have become clear (we call these individuals reconcilers). But every record will be subject to this checking and reconciliation process before being considered a part of the dataset ready for public distribution.

There is obviously a trade-off between efficient and reliable coding in any research study. We believe the procedure described above maximizes reliability while providing a reasonably efficient coding method as well. The links below provide more information about our estimates of efficiency and reliability.

Efficiency
Reliability