Application of Data Gathering Procedures
Today businesses and organizations are connected to their clients, patients, customers, users, employees, vendors, consumers, allies, and sometimes even their competitors. Data can tell a story about any of these relationships, and with this information, organizations can improve almost any aspect of their operations.
Although data can be valuable, too much information is unwieldy, and the wrong data is useless. The right data collection method can mean the difference between useful insights and time-wasting misdirection. Finding data quickly and with minimal time, energy, and resources wasted requires the correct data gathering procedure or tools.
Luckily, organizations have several tools at their disposal for primary data collection. The methods range from traditional and simple, such as a face-to-face interview, to more sophisticated ways to collect and analyze data.
Data gathering is vital for the legitimacy of a research. Without data, your propositions or researches are bound to either fail or be denied. Data gathering can be quite a burden that requires effort and lots of grinding from the researchers. A tribulation if you will. But if done correctly, can be greatly beneficial to your work.
Here are data collection methods that are most frequently used and most familiar to many researchers and data gatherers:
Interviews
Questionnaires and surveys
Observations
Documents and records
Focus groups
Oral histories
1. Interviews
If you asked someone completely unaware of data analysis how to best collect information from people, the most common answer would likely be interviews.
Almost anyone can come up with a list of questions, but the key to efficient interviews is knowing what to ask and how to ask them. Efficiency in interviewing is crucial because, of all the primary data collection methods, in-person interviewing can be the most expensive since it mostly includes travelling to the interviewee, even providing refreshments for some.
There are ways to limit the cost of interviews, such as conducting them over the phone or through a web chat interface. But sometimes an in-person interview can be worth the cost, as the interviewer can tailor follow-up questions based on responses in a real-time exchange. Long-distance interviews rely heavily on powerful and fast reception, if your area does not have this factor, you have no choice but ti interview in-person.
Interviews also allow for open-ended questions. Compared to other primary data collection methods, such as surveys, interviews are more customizable and responsive.
2. Observation
Observation involves collecting information without asking questions. This method is more subjective, as it requires the researcher, or observer, to add their judgment to the data. But in some circumstances, the risk of bias is minimal. You need to be vigilant in this method as missing something may be detrimental to your data.
For example, if a study involves the number of people in a restaurant at a given time, unless the observer counts incorrectly, the data should be reasonably reliable. Variables that require the observer to make distinctions, such as how many millennials visit a restaurant in a given period, can introduce potential problems.
In general, observation can determine the dynamics of a situation, which generally cannot be measured through other data collection techniques. Observation also can be combined with additional information, such as video. You can also record audios and videos, and take pictures in case you missed something or you want to review what you have observed. These documents can serve as evidence if ever your data is doubted upon.
3. Documents and records
Sometimes you can collect a considerable amount of data without asking anyone anything. Document- and records-based research uses existing data for a study. Attendance records, meeting minutes, and financial records are just a few examples of this type of research. This method hastens your research since data is already there.
Using documents and records can be efficient and inexpensive because you’re predominantly using research that has already been completed. However, since the researcher has less control over the results, documents and records can be an incomplete data source. Never forget to site the sources of existing data as well.
4. Focus groups
A combination of interviewing, surveying, and observing, a focus group is a data collection method that involves several individuals who have something in common. The purpose of a focus group is to add a collective element to individual data collection.
A focus group study can ask participants to watch a presentation, for example, then discuss the content before answering survey or interview-style questions.
Focus groups often use open-ended questions such as, “How did you feel about the presentation?” or “What did you like best about the product?” The focus group moderator can ask the group to think back to the shared experience, rather than forward to the future.
Open-ended questions ground the research in a particular state of mind, eliminating external interference.
5. Oral histories
At first glance, an oral history might sound like an interview. Both data collection methods involve asking questions. But an oral history is more precisely defined as the recording, preservation, and interpretation of historical information based on the opinions and personal experiences of people who were involved in the events.
Unlike interviews and surveys, oral histories are linked to a single phenomenon. For example, a researcher may be interested in studying the effect of a flood on a community. An oral history can shed light on exactly what transpired. It’s a holistic approach to evaluation that uses a variety of techniques.
As in interviewing, the researcher can become a confounding variable. A confounding variable is an extra, unintended variable that can skew your results by introducing bias and suggesting a correlation where there isn’t one.
The classic example is the correlation between murder rates and ice cream sales. Both figures have, at one time or another, risen together. An unscientific conclusion may be that the more people buy ice cream, the higher the occurrence of murder.
However, there is a third possibility that an additional variable affects both of these occurrences. In the case of ice cream and murder, the other variable is the weather. Warmer weather is a confounding variable to both murder rates and ice cream sales.
6. Questionnaires and surveys
Questionnaires and surveys can be used to ask questions that have closed-ended answers.
Data gathered from questionnaires and surveys can be analyzed in many different ways. You can assign numerical values to the data to speed up the analysis. This can be useful if you’re collecting a large amount of data from a large population.
To be meaningful, surveys and questionnaires need to be carefully planned. Unlike an interview, where a researcher can react to the direction of a respondent’s answers, a poorly designed questionnaire will lead the study nowhere quickly. While surveys are often less expensive than interviews, they won’t be valuable if they aren’t handled correctly.
Surveys can be conducted as interviews, but in most cases, it makes sense to conduct surveys using forms.
Online forms are a modern and effective way to conduct surveys. Unlike written surveys, which are static, the questions presented in online forms can change according to how someone responds. For instance, if you use JotForm to create your forms, when someone answers no to a question about allergies, they won’t have to scroll past all of the related follow-up questions about specific allergies. Instead, they’ll go immediately to a question on a different topic.
Modern form building also emphasizes mobile data collection, so the forms can easily be viewed and filled out on mobile devices.
Proper Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography
A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. Occasionally you will be asked to write one as a separate assignment (sometimes in the form of an annotated bibliography), but more often it is part of the introduction to an essay, research report, or thesis. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries.
Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas:
1. Information Seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books.
2. Critical Appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.
A literature review must do these things:
Be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing.
Synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known.
Identify areas of controversy in the literature.
Formulate questions that need further research.
Finding the right sources for your literature review can be quite a chore since you have to check for validity and accuracy of the source, not to mention also the author. You also need to check if the research is still recent and relevant, maybe there are new sources with the same study that are already published.
You also should not rely on one source, you need to check multiple sources in order to contrast and compare, thus increasing the integrity of you literature review.
A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It’s usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question.
If you are writing an annotated bibliography, you may need to summarize each item briefly, but should still follow through themes and concepts and do some critical assessment of material. Use an overall introduction and conclusion to state the scope of your coverage and to formulate the question, problem, or concept your chosen material illuminates. Usually you will have the option of grouping items into sections—this helps you indicate comparisons and relationships. You may be able to write a paragraph or so to introduce the focus of each section.
An annotated bibliography gives an account of the research that has been done on a given topic. Like any bibliography, an annotated bibliography is an alphabetical list of research sources. In addition to bibliographic data, an annotated bibliography provides a concise summary of each source and some assessment of its value or relevance. Depending on your assignment, an annotated bibliography may be one stage in a larger research project, or it may be an independent project standing on its own.
The quality and usefulness of your bibliography will depend on your selection of sources. Define the scope of your research carefully so that you can make good judgments about what to include and exclude. Your research should attempt to be reasonably comprehensive within well-defined boundaries.
Like the literature review, sources used in annotated bibliography must be recent, relevant, accurate, and valid. You also need to properly site the sources and give credit where credit is due.
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