In the past two decades, advances in computing technology have made available ever-increasing amounts of information while at the same time providing ever-more practical approaches to efficiently managing those data. For social scientists these technical developments have resulted in improved methods for collecting, documenting, and analyzing survey and other types of data. A further consequence has been the recognition of the importance of research metadata and metadata standards that serve as organizational frameworks to greatly facilitate all aspects of the conduct of survey research.

The inclusion of comprehensive metadata in the research process greatly clarifies the methods used to capture and produce datasets, and it provides users of those datasets the information needed to better analyze, interpret, preserve, and share them. Richly structured metadata are even more important with longitudinal studies that contain thousands of variables of many different types. MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) is a national longitudinal study of approximately 12,000 Americans that studies aging as an integrated bio-psycho-social process. MIDUS has a broad and unique blend of social, health, and biomarker data collected over 20 years through a variety of modes. For the last decade, MIDUS has increasingly relied on a metadata standard called the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to manage and document these complex research data.

Most recently, MIDUS secured funding to improve its DDI infrastructure and create a DDI-based, harmonized data extraction system. Such a system allows researchers to search across datasets for variables of interest, identify and harmonize related longitudinal versions of variables, and easily create customized data extracts and codebooks that are directly related to their research questions. This system acts as a portal to the MIDUS study’s data and documentation, and the rich metadata allow researchers to spend more time analyzing data instead of managing, merging, or searching for it. This presentation will explain the rationale and demonstrate the results of the MIDUS DDI portal.