A Metadata Schema for Data from Experiments in the Social Sciences

The use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the social sciences has greatly expanded, resulting in newly abundant, high-quality data that can be reused to perform methods research in program evaluation, to systematize evidence for policymakers, and for replication and training purposes. However, potential users of RCT data often face significant barriers to discovery and reuse. This paper proposes a metadata schema that standardizes RCT data documentation and can serve as the basis for one—or many, interoperable —data catalogs that make such data easily findable, searchable, and comparable, and thus more readily reusable for secondary research. The schema is designed to document the unique properties of RCT data. Its set of fields and associated encoding schemes (acceptable formats and values) can be used to describe any dataset associated with a social science RCT. The paper also makes recommendations for implementing a catalog or database based on this metadata schema.