Redatam Informa Vol. 17 (English)

The origins of REDATAM date back to the early 1980s. By that point, CELADE had the relevant experience and could offer a technological response to the needs mentioned above. The era’s interest in studying fertility changes and their consequences on the people’s quality of life led to, among other initiatives, the World Fertility Survey (WFS). To make it easier to  
use these surveys, CELADE, toward the end of the 1970s, developed a software for mainframe computers, based on the “Rapid” program (Statistics Canada www.statcan.ca), combined with the survey processing capabilities of the SPSS program (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), whose innovating feature was the ability to invert and then “read” questionnaire matrices and their variables.1 Inverting variable files made it possible to read the data much faster. By only accessing variables of interest, inversion saves significant time in the process, and, with SPSS, it was possible to produce tabulations and statistics using these data. The creation of this computer program was an important step forward in census microdata processing for Latin American countries, and its development kept pace with other technological breakthroughs in computing.

In the early 1980s, the penetration and use of personal microcomputers in Latin American countries began to grow. Early on, they were much slower than mini and mainframe computers, but with the CELADE developed strategy of reading the file variables in reverse already receiving recognition, it was possible to accelerate processing times, with programs obtaining a specifi c tabulation by only accessing required and chosen variables and entries. This processing logic, in addition to the advances made in personal computer technology, opened up a new horizon in the development of census microdata processing tools.

With this step in computer development, on top of the potential for censuses to produce information geographically disaggregated into small units –of people, of households, and of dwellings in a given country– the REDATAM software developing project was born. The name comes from the acronym for REtrieval of DATa for small Areas by Microcomputers. The philosophy behind the development of this software was to offer a user-friendly tool that was accessible to all public policy and population researchers and decision makers.