Ex post survey harmonization is in a way a passive form of pooling research funding because you can utilize information from surveying that were made on somebody else’s expense. The aim of ex ante survey harmonization is to maximize the value from future retrospective harmonization; in a way, it is an active form of pooling research funding, because you benefit from money spent on related open governmental and open science survey programs.
A new version of the retroharmonize R package – which is working with retrospective, ex post harmonization of survey data – was released yesterday after peer-review on CRAN. It allows us to compare opinion polling data from the Arab Barometer with the Eurobarometer and Afrorbarometer. This is the first version that is released in the rOpenGov community, a community of R package developers on open government data analytics and related topics.