What are "paradata" anyway?

In preparing a manuscript, I found myself defining paradata to include interviewer observations. Interviewer observations are questions asked of the interviewer while they are in the process of attempting or completing an interview. They might range from information about the neighborhood of the sampled unit, guesses about who might live in the sampled unit, or information about the person who was just interviewed.

Classifying these observations as paradata seemed logical to me at the time since they are not sampling frame data and they aren't reports from the sampled unit. But are they paradata? Are they generated by the process of data collection? Or, is anything that doesn't come from the sampling frame or respondent by default count as paradata?

It's probably worth the exercise of developing a more precise definition. If only for the economy of language that such precision should afford.

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