Design question from newbie

[Andrew Ward <andrew.ward@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello MySQL users,

I've just started out with MySQL, and have already bought and read Paul
DuBois's excellent book. Nevertheless, I'm not exactly sure how to start
making a database for all the data I have.

What I have are responses from questionnaires administered to several
organisations over a number of years. While the questionnaires are very
similar in many ways, they are certainly not identical. I wish to calculate
what common statistics I can for the purpose of longitudinal comparisons
within and between organisations.

The raw data looks a bit like
	ID,YEAR,SEX,AGE,RATING A,RATING B, ...
	1,2001,1,3,7,6,...
As I said, not all organisations were asked the same questions so I can't
just put the data in directly

The only way I can see of dealing with this is to create tables like
	ID,QUESTION,RESPONSE
	1,"YEAR",2001
	1,"SEX",1
	1,"AGE",3
	1,"RATING A", 7
	1,"RATING B", 6
	...

This doesn't strike me as very smart. I would greatly value anyone's advice
on dealing with data that is similar in many respects but different in
others. Thank you very much.


Regards,


Andrew C. Ward

andrew.ward@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
	

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