Energie Sisma Emilia. Guida all'utilizzo dei database dell'indagine 'Energie_I400'

After the series of earthquakes that occurred in Emilia-Romagna (Italy) in May 2012, the research team based in the Department of Economics of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia started research activities to investigate the socio-economic impact due to the shock. When analysing the effects of the earthquake on the living and working conditions of the population, a critical issue is the availability of relevant data. Thus, within the applied research ‘Energie Sisma Emilia’, in 2015 the research team realized a survey on a sample of 400 families living in the area affected by the earthquake. The survey was based on the same questionnaire adopted in the previous research ICESmo3 (carried on in Summer 2012) investigating the socio-economic conditions of families living in the same area. The 2015 questionnaire includes additional sections on the effects of the earthquake on social capital and consumption behaviour. Data are under analysis and will be presented in public events and publications. The dataset will be made available on request at the end of the research project. The goal of this paper is to return the main methodological aspects, and to present the principles that guided management of data and that drive the use of databases. Section I describes the main issues addressed by the ‘Energie Sisma Emilia’ project. Section II introduces the general survey settings; the sample characteristics; and the elaboration of sample weights. Section III describes the details of the informational basis (organization of specific databases, codebook and command files developed to generate databases in format Stata13). Section IV presents the criteria that align the databases and the questionnaire: variables management was originally handled to allow researchers to easily retrieve information from the syntax of the variable labels, and to automatize future elaborations. Section V concludes with operational indications in using ‘Stata Survey’ to produce inferential analysis.