Paper-based data collection has been around as long as humans have had an interest in understanding the world around them — tick marks on parchment were used by ancient civilizations…
Numbers are everywhere and drive our day-to-day lives. We take decisions based on numbers, both at work and in our personal lives. For example, an organization may rely on sales…
Data collection is a minefield of errors. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a researcher with one survey in the field, an NGO with 10 data collection drives per month, or…
Today’s news is filled with stories of data misuse — for example, Cambridge Analytica harvesting personal data via Facebook and Amazon, Facebook’s Android app logging metadata on every call and…
Imagine that you want to understand why your mother loves making pancakes for breakfast. You could sneak around the kitchen, tracking when and how she makes pancakes, or you could…
Observational data is a valuable form of research that can give researchers information that goes beyond numbers and statistics. In general, observation is a systematic way to collect data by…
The most challenging part about designing any survey is to identify and create the right set of questions. Typically, there are two types of survey questions – open-ended questions and…
You want to collect all the relevant data about your program, but you also want to be judicious about it. Otherwise you’ll end up being overwhelmed by data. Remember, there…
What Is a Focus Group Discussion? A focus group discussion (or FGD) is a qualitative research method in the social sciences, with a particular emphasis and application in the developmental…
Any research is only as good as the data that drives it, so choosing the right technique of data collection can make all the difference. In this article, we will…