Appendix B. Data management 143 Appendix B - Data management Data collection For the purpose of this study, the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) provided me in the fall of 2015 with the digitalized club membership records of all registered members of Dutch amateur football clubs from 2005 onwards. In consultation with the KNVB, playing seasons for membership records were determined to start on the 15th of August and end on the 15th of May. This resulted in a dataset with almost 13 million anonymized membership records distributed over ten playing seasons. To gain information on the ethnic background of members and other background characteristics needed to conduct the empirical analyses for this dissertation, the membership data provided by the KNVB needed to be matched with microdata from Statistics Netherlands. To do so, membership records contained not only information on members’ playing season and club membership, but also information on their date of birth, postal code and gender. Using these markers, roughly 94 percent of the membership records could be successfully matched by Statistics Netherlands. Data processing and analysis All matched records were assigned a unique anonymous identifier by Statistics Netherlands. The membership data were first cleaned by identifying false duplicate records and false original records. This resulted in 12,633,031 records, of which 12,093,428 records (96%) had been matched. The unique identifiers were used to merge the membership records with data on sociodemographic markers, such as country of birth, age, and sex, data on income, and housing data. Based on these merged data, the variables used in this study were subsequently constructed and used for analysis. Data processing and analysis was done by using a combination of the statistical software packages SPSS and R. All steps undertaken in this process starting with the raw matched data and ending with the final analyses, were recorded and can be, if necessary, reproduced. Data storage and protection The original anonymized membership data provided by the KNVB have been securely stored in Yoda, the protected research data management service of
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw