addition in dictionary item caused issue in the downloaded data

[Gregory Martin]

We did not receive an email at cspro@lists.census.gov. Perhaps the email was blocked because of the attachment. Can you put the files on Google Drive or Dropbox and send a link to us?

[asif]

Thank you Gregory for your response, please leave these files as i have discarded these interviews.
i have asked about the right approach for managing waves, would you be replying here or i should put another query for it.

[Gregory Martin]

Personally, my preference on how to handle longitudinal surveys is to use different dictionaries and data files for each wave of the survey. Between waves, you can prepare a data file that contains information that has to be referenced in the next round of the survey. Then you use this data--which is read-only--to prefill parts of the data entry application, or to validate new answers based on previous answers.

I think this approach is cleaner than using the same dictionary over and over from one round to the next. One challenge is that you may have to reformat your data at some point, using the Reformat Data tool or a batch application, if you want to tabulate or export data from multiple rounds using the same variable names, though you could also do that in SPSS or whatever program you will eventually use for data analysis.