Guidelines for handling variables in repeated contexts

DDI standards offer an extremely valuable solution to metadata management throughout the whole data acquisition, processing and dissemination phases. However, when documenting variables in repeated context - one of the most fundamental entities of any data process - challenges may arise to find the ideal way of using DDI. There are several contexts in which repeated variables are created including longitudinal surveys and question reuse over different studies, which have been captured by use cases. An informal working group has been working on the subject since 2023 and presented some first results at the EDDI23 conference. This presentation will provide an update since then and will include an outline of guidelines driven by real life use cases, as well as pending issues, and ways to help contribute to this topic.