REDCap Tip of the Month: Leveraging the Codebook

Leveraging the Codebook

REDCap projects often have multiple stakeholders, each with a different area of interest or focus for the project. The REDCap proficiencies of these stakeholders can also vary, which poses challenges when you are trying to provide a high-level overview of how you are constructing the project’s variables.

One solution to this challenge is to leverage the Codebook that is already incorporated in REDCap. The Codebook is a read-only version of the much larger Data Dictionary for the project. This read-only document thus allows stakeholders to quickly view and follow the variable name, field label, branching logic, and field attributes for each and every variable in your project.

The Codebook can be found in the “Project Home” section of each REDCap project.

You can print out the codebook directly or export it as a PDF via the “Print Page” button. Note that the codebook does not contain any personal health information, even if your project is set up to capture that kind of data.

This is a running update of the REDCap tip of the month provided by the University of Washington Institute of Translational Health Sciences. To read more tips on the ITHS website, click here.

Michael Hazard | 5/10/2016