Using the Data Cleaner to Clean and Import Data into Lighthouse Studio

In previous versions of Lighthouse Studio (formerly known as SSI Web) you would use this Data Cleaner utility to keep or delete data from your survey. Rather than using the built-in filters capability of Lighthouse Studio, some people prefer to look at the data in a spreadsheet, sorting by different criteria, to check for speeders or straight-liners or other obviously bad responses. As they look at the data in a spreadsheet, they create a list of the respondents data they want to keep, usually the respondent numbers. This is saved as a "filter file" CSV which is used by the data cleaner to filter out unwanted data.

1. Go to your online Admin module. Download the data by clicking on the Download link under Data Management. This will allow you to save the "studyname_data.csv" file to your computer. Place this .csv file into your study folder.
2. Open up this "studyname_data.csv" in Excel to evaluate the data for cleaning.
3. In Excel create a new .csv file. Call it something like "filter.csv" and store it in your study folder. Inside this file you can use any field as a filter. For example, you can place a different respondent number on each row or do something like this:
4. In the Data Cleaner, open up the original "studyname_data.csv" file. Then load in your filter file, "filter.csv". Press the Clean File button to clean your data. Your cleaned data will now be named "studyname_data.csv". It will make a backup of the original uncleaned file called "studyname_data.csv.bak 001".
5. In Lighthouse Studio, open up your study and go to Data Management > View/Edit data. Delete all of the existing data (leftovers from previous "Get Data" processes or test data) since we now only want to look at the final cleaned data. We need to wipe the slate clean. You can also delete the "studyname.db3" file in your study folder to delete all of the data.
6. In Lighthouse Studio, go to Data Management > Get Data and select the second option, Import study data files. Click the elipses on the far right, open up your study folder, and find the "studyname_data.csv". Click Get Data to load the data into the local database.
7. Click View/Edit Data to verify that the cleaned data has been loaded in.
8. Estimate utilities.