Penna - A Tool for Collecting Qualitative Textual Data

(Poster presentation at the EDDI19 in Tampere University, Tampere, December 3-4, 2019.)

Penna is a web application for collecting self-administered writings for research purposes. It was built at Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) and has been in production since fall 2017. FSD offers Penna as a service for researchers to collect metadata and writings easily. FSD gets to archive the collected data. FSD and the researcher construct together a questionnaire which is a web form to be shared with possible respondents. The respondents fill the form and submit it. After the collection period is over FSD can export the questionnaire and the writings as a package that can be delivered to themselves and the researcher.

The exported questionnaires can be later imported to create new questionnaires. Additionally, a DDI Codebook of the questionnaire is included in the export package. The DDI file consists of questions/variables of the questionnaire and metadata about the collection. The file is compatible with DDI-C versions 2.1 and 2.5. The DDI file can be used as a basis for documenting the data.

This poster will present Penna’s features and technical details from the perspective of different types of users. We will also demonstrate the use of Penna.