Getting started with data analysis

Assuming that the survey has already been conducted and that the data has been entered into a computer system, what is the next step?

Preliminary analysis

• Descriptive statistics

Exploratory data analysis

• Plots (points, lines, scatterplots, …), histograms, …

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Transcript

So, as you start your data analysis - What do you need to do?  You need to first begin by saying, "I need to get the data into the computer system" I better have thought about how I'm going to do that! So be very, very careful that you optimize getting your data in without having to sit there reading off pieces of paper, typing in the data yourself. It's prone to errors. It takes a lot of time.  And you regret doing it.  So, make sure you can get your data. The next thing is you're going to do a preliminary analysis. You're going to compute some basic descriptive statistics mean, median, max, min, etc.  And then, you want to do a so-called exploratory data analysis. And this generally involves generating some plots, as points or lines or scatter plots or histograms or whatever. But it's to help you start to get a feel for what's going on in the data.