The Data Loofah is an investigative tool used to assess the quality of data prior to statistical analysis. Even with the best care and data management practices data can accumulate errors that can be difficult to catch and may negatively impact the analysis process and results. This is where the Data Loofah comes in. The Data Loofah will summarize variables and outcomes to help you identify potential errors like extreme, nonsensical, inconsistent and missing values, and incorrectly categorized variables.
The purpose of the Data Loofah is to facilitate identifying data errors; it does not support correcting the errors and does not conduct statistical analyses. While the Data Loofah will generate summary statistics, the purpose of these summaries is for identifying data errors and should not be used for reporting scientific results.
For inquiries, please email dataloofah@ucdavis.edu.
The first link below can only be accessed by a UC Davis/UC Davis Health computer or through a UC Davis/UC Davis Health VPN connection. For those without access to a UC Davis/UC Davis Health connection, the Data Loofah Repository contains a link to download the Data Loofah Data Assessment Tool.