Can I rename variables, despite the survey already being published?

Question

I would like to rename the variables of my survey to accelerate the pre-processing of the data for the analysis (e.g from 'A_302' to 'income_percent'). However, the survey is already published and quite some data was collected. Now I am wondering what happens if I change the names of the variables at this point. Will the names change also for the collected data? Or will I have two different datasets, one with the old names and one with the new ones?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Yes, you can change the variable - unless you have set custom names before and are using these in PHP filters.

What SoSci Survey will do is this: It will register an alias for the respective variable, and use that alias in the downloaded data set.

For PHP code that means: A value('AB01_01') will still find the variable A01_01 (technical name), but value('FamilyName') will also work if that is the variable's new name.

Comments

Thanks a lot!